


Djinn Rummy

by casicastiel (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Genie/Djinn, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge 2013, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-05
Updated: 2013-11-05
Packaged: 2017-12-31 13:30:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1032245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/casicastiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With the gates of Heaven and Hell finally shut, Dean is forced to take a deeper look at his relationship, both past and present, with Castiel. However, in so doing, Dean comes to some startling realizations about himself, the person he thinks is his best friend, and the world they both live in.</p><p>(Written for the <a href="http://deancasbigbang.livejournal.com">Dean/Cas Big Bang 2013</a>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Contains a suicide attempt by a major character.

“Really, Sam. _Really?_ ”

Sam stares at him from the table, as if he doesn’t have the mental capacity to process Dean’s lack of enthusiasm about a hunt. Maybe he doesn’t.

“It’s been _two days_ , Sam,” Dean emphasizes. “Two days ago, you were _dying_.”

“So?”

“So, what the fuck? Closing the Gates of Hell itself not enough for you? Killing Crowley? None of that ring any bells for you? Gotta —” Dean gestures wildly — “turn right around and pick up a monster hunt? I thought this was gonna be, like, our swan song.”

“Swan song?” Sam makes a face.

“ _Whatever_. I thought this was, you know, it for us.”

Sam frowns. “Look, Dean. We’ve at least got to go back to the bunker before we do anything else, and this is here. Plus, Garth said we’re the only hunters in the area, and five people have disappeared in just the last three weeks.”

“When the hell did you talk to Garth?”

“Like, ten minutes ago. You were right there, Dean.”

Dean grumbles something unintelligible, drags a hand over his face, and reluctantly moves over to the table where Sam has the research spread. “Alright, who were the vics?”

“One adult male, one adult female, and three college students. All were last seen, uh, going to bed in their homes, and then in the morning they were gone. Cops say there were no signs of forced entry or struggle with any of them, but none of them took any of their stuff with them and no one saw or heard them leave.”

“And you’re sure this is a monster thing? I mean, people do just disappear sometimes. For. You know. People reasons.”

“Not when it’s five disappearances in two weeks,” Sam reminds him.

“Huh.” Dean wanders back to sit on the bed. “So what are we thinking?”

“Well, it’s not a cyclical creature, the disappearances don’t follow any sort of lunar or solar pattern.”

“Uh-huh, and in English?”

“Not a werewolf. Or any other beast like that. Garth was thinking djinn, maybe, because of the stealth and the random victim pattern.”

“Great. Sure. So, interviews, right?”

Sam gives him a look that falls somewhere between sympathetic and ‘oh my God, I’m talking to a five-year-old’, and starts raking the files together into a stack. “Dean, I know it’s too soon —”

Dean smiles wryly and shakes his head. “Yeah, no shit. Let’s just do the job.”

* * *

Dean wakes up in a bed he doesn’t recognize. It’s neither his, though he wouldn’t mind the comfort of his own room right now, nor the solid motel mattress he remembers going to sleep on. So the djinn got him. This week just keeps getting better, he thinks to himself, shoving himself up to sit against the headboard and survey his new dream-digs.

The first thing he notices is that the other side of the bed is empty. The covers are pushed back, though, and there’s a light on somewhere outside the room, so his magical hot beer-advertisement girlfriend must be waiting outside to ambush him. The rest of the room is pretty bare; there’s a dresser, a desk, and a closet, but nothing on the walls, and only the typical detritus of life on the surfaces. There is a pile of mail on the desk, though — bingo, Dean thinks, flicking on the light next to him and swinging out of the bed to investigate.

Most of it’s addressed to him. A cell phone bill, two junk advertisements, a _Reader’s Digest_ , and it’s only when he reaches the bottom of the stack that he strikes gold. _NBT BANK_ , it proclaims, and a name in a small full-width font behind the plastic window that’s definitely not his. The dim light makes it hard to see, but the name looks like LUCAS J. NOVAK.

And hold the hell up, that’s a guy’s name, right? He’s never known anyone named Lucas, Dean thinks, rummaging through his memories to remember all the various people he’s known over the years. After all, even the Carmen that the djinn gave him for a girlfriend the first time he went through this was named after the first girl he dated in middle school.

 _Novak_ , though. There’s something definitely ringing a bell there, and it’s not just the headache he woke up with. He’s run into a Novak before, he’s sure of it, he just can’t remember when —

Wait, shit. Novak, that was that — weird religious dude, Cas’ vessel, the one that practically got his whole family murdered by demons because he wouldn’t fucking listen when Dean and Sam said “stay put.” He was a pretty decent guy, Dean supposes, but nothing to make heads turn; although to be honest, Dean had really had a lot more on his mind at the time than whether or not the guy was boyfriend material. For Christ’s sake, he hadn’t even realized he was into dudes back then.

He’s still trying to puzzle out why the djinn would choose to go all the way back to pull a guy — and _that_ guy — out of his memories for him, when a hand settles on his back, between his shoulderblades, and an all-too-familiar voice mumbles, “Couldn’t sleep, either?” and it all slots into place.

Novak. Castiel’s vessel. Lucas. Lu- _cas_.

 _Fuck_.

He sets the now-crumpled letter back on the desk, and turns around. He’d guessed right; it’s Cas, and Cas looks — well, Cas looks _human_ , staring at him from sleep-bleary eyes, holding a glass of water in the hand that’s not resting on Dean’s shoulder. And yeah, Dean knows he saw the guy sleep and eat and shit (boy, had that been a fun day) back around the Apocalypse, but he was still always fundamentally something _other_ when you got down to it.

This version of Cas is definitely different, though; not as much aesthetically, although the messy hair and wrinkly sleep-clothes are a far cry from the artfully tousled hair and eternally rumpled trenchcoat of the original model, but in his behavior. Even from the few seconds Dean’s been watching him right now, with expert hunter’s eyes cataloguing mannerisms and movements and calculating all the ways to deal with all the ways this situation could go wrong, he can tell that the djinn has somehow manipulated his knowledge of Castiel to create a completely new version of the guy.

This time, Dean realizes, it’s not just a parallel, a world where his mom never died or his family never hunted, but a completely alternate universe. This Cas is human and he _looks_ human, too, like he grew up in a normal, functional household with a mom and a dad and went to school and college and even if supernatural shit did exist in this world Cas probably never even knew about it.

While Dean’s standing there philosophizing about his best friend’s existence, Cas finishes his water, sets the glass on the desk, stretches, and shuffles back over to the bed. “Come on,” he yawns. “I’ve got an early day tomorrow.”

Dean swallows, feet suddenly frozen to the floor. He’s slept with guys before, but he’s never _slept_ with a guy before. Some hysterical little voice in the back of his mind is mocking him in falsetto, and he clambers back over to the bed to shut his own mind up if nothing else.

Sleep, thankfully, comes quickly.

* * *

The next morning, Dean gets up to an empty house. Cas wasn’t lying about having an “early day,” whatever that meant, he muses, having glanced at the clock: 7:30 AM. At least he’s got some time to figure out what’s what around here, so he doesn’t make a fool of himself the way he did last time, breaking into his mom’s house in the middle of the night and being basically an absolute jackass to everyone involved.

Over breakfast, he looks himself up online. Dean Winchester: raised in Lawrence, Kansas by a single father, community college graduate, now a moderately-well-liked high school history teacher in Chenoa, a small town outside of — Jesus _Christ_ — Pontiac, Illinois. The only thing on his criminal record is a half-dozen speeding tickets. He’s about to start searching for Cas — well, _Lucas —_ when the doorbell rings.

“ _Charlie_?!”

“No, dumbass, the Pale Orc.” She pushes past him into the house, depositing a messenger bag on the couch and moving into the kitchen to start the coffeemaker. “Told you I was coming over today,” she calls back to him, “not my fault you weren’t listening.”

“Yeah, and why, exactly, are you here?”

“Your education.” Dean squints at her, and she rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, we’re teachers, what a funny joke, laugh it up. No. It’s summer. You’re watching movies with me.”

Dean holds up his hands in surrender. Charlie opens the messenger bag, and starts laying out her wares. First, handled lovingly like a precious heirloom, is a full box-set of the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy, followed by probably a couple dozen DVD cases. Some, Dean recognizes, some he’s even watched (he spots some of the _Star Wars_ movies in the mix), and some, though he only catches them out of the corner of his eye, look totally unfamiliar.

Last to come out of the bag are a stack of thin jewel cases. Charlie makes to quietly slide them underneath her _Harry Potter_ collection, but Dean grabs the top one off the pile before she can hide them away. “ _Star Trek: The Motion Picture_ ,” he reads, from the home-printed, faded but still clearly legible insert. “Did you make this?”

Charlie sighs. “My dad. He got on the VHS-to-DVD bandwagon _super_ early. He thought if he didn’t copy all his tapes to DVDs that they’d become obsolete and be lost to him forever. Which, I mean, he was right, obviously, but still. Way ahead of his time.”

Dean starts to ask about her father, but thinks better of it. Instead, he reaches over to take the rest of the cases from her, glancing through them to find one in particular. “Here we go,” he announces, showing her his pick. “ _The Final Frontier_. I saw this one when it came out.”

“Really?” Charlie settles the stacks of movies into neat piles as she talks. “What were you, like, five?”

“Ten,” Dean huffs, carding a pile of cases together between his fingers. “Skipped school with a coupla other kids and snuck into the matinee. It was the only way my dad wouldn’t know about it.”

“Sounds like your dad,” Charlie mutters. Dean chooses to ignore both that comment and the idea that Charlie knows about his dad, and moves over to figure out the TV.

The homemade DVD, as they soon find out, doesn’t contain subtitles, but between Dean’s recollection of the plot of the movie and Charlie’s rudimentary knowledge of Klingon, they’re able to piece together the dialogue.

Cas walks in just as the movie is finishing up. Dean catches his eye and pats the empty spot on the couch, but Cas shakes his head. As Dean watches him retreating, Captain Kirk begins to speak on screen behind him. “ _I lost a brother once_ ,” he tells his friends, “ _but I was lucky. I got him back._ ”

Dean’s gaze snaps back to the screen. “ _I thought you said men like us don’t have families_ ,” Dr. McCoy speaks up. Kirk smiles, glancing at Spock, and replies:

“ _I was wrong._ ”

Charlie sighs dreamily, and Cas, having re-entered the room, glances over in interest. Dean suddenly hears his own words from several months ago — _“guys like us, we don’t get a home, we don’t get families” —_ and, looking between his two friends, wonders if maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t wrong, too.

Maybe, he decides on a whim, it wouldn’t hurt to stick around for a little while. Time’s faster in his head, anyway; the difference between a day and a week is probably something like hours outside, and Sam will yell at him the same way regardless.

Charlie, after the silence stretches awkwardly well past ‘actually interested in the credits’, speaks up. “So. You’re still coming over tomorrow night, right?”

“What?” Dean turns to her, trying to ignore the fact that he was just mentally trying to picture himself and Cas as Kirk and Spock.

“Game night,” Charlie prompts, slow and exaggerated. “ _Right_?”

“Uh, yeah, right, of course.” Dean can just imagine the kind of games Charlie plays. Which, now that he thinks about it, are probably exactly the same kind he would enjoy, so there’s no concern there.

“And — Cas?” Charlie asks, like she’s having to drag information out of a child.

“Um.” Dean has no idea whether this Cas is as socially ignorant as the original model, or whether he plays Dungeons and Dragons in his downtime. “Is he invited?”

Charlie glares at him, scooting over to take the DVD out of the player. “Dude. We set this up, like, two weeks ago. Of course he’s invited. Unless —” a not-very-well-hidden grin takes over her face — “you two are fighting or something?”

“Why would you think that?” he retorts, defensive. Of course, he can’t deny that of the something like 7 years he’s known Cas, well over two-thirds of that time they’ve been at odds over something. First it was destiny, then God, then Heaven’s war, then squabbling about who got to be the most suicidal in Purgatory, and most recently the Heaven shitstorm....

Well. If you wanted to take that question to the real world, then yeah, he and Cas were definitely ‘fighting’. They’d been sort of frosty with each other for a while, though it wasn’t really either of their faults; Cas was yanked out of Purgatory by the special ops division of the God-squad and put to work as some sort of informant on the Winchesters without even knowing it. When they finally realized what was happening — which included Castiel trying to steal the angel tablet and then nearly beating Dean to death over it, a day Dean tries his damnedest not to remember for several reasons — he flew off _on his own,_ the idiot, and got tortured by Naomi _and_ Crowley for his efforts.

Then Metatron came into the picture, with that creepy Mr. Rogers kind of look that counted as an automatic vote of suspicion in Dean’s book. He offered Cas three trials to lock up all the angels forever, to have some kind of goddamn family pow-wow and make everything all better again: idealistic and neatly tailored to Castiel’s savior complex. Metatron had neglected to mention, of course, that the third trial was _cutting out the fucking Grace_ of the one doing the trials, something they only found out from Naomi at the last minute, and by then Cas was too far gone on the idea to care. Sam and Dean had only just finished the ritual with Crowley, watching him and all of the other demons vanishing through the closing Gate into the earth, when calls from the hunter community had started pouring in.

Descriptions ranged from “A weird meteor shower thing, except they were going _into_ the sky” to “Some sort of banishing spell, maybe?”, but even without the reports, they both knew what had happened. The angels were gone, and Cas was gone right along with them. Kevin told them the next day that it was like his prophet-powers had just vanished; the tablets were back to being illegible hunks of rock, the headaches were gone, and instead of an archangel-protected Prophet of the Lord they were confronted with a scared and exhausted teenager.

Life, somehow, went on. Later that evening, they received a call from Garth, who’d in turn heard from Mrs. Tran, who had been a prisoner of Crowley’s — not dead, as Kevin believed, and it was a victory in itself to see the look on his face when Sam relayed the information. They’d immediately started the drive to Michigan, and dropped the two of them off at their house with a promise to stop by whenever they were in the area and a primer on how to protect a house from the monsters that remained at large in the world.

After the first time Sam had tried to ask about Castiel, which resulted in Dean glaring silently at him for several minutes, they reached a mutual agreement not to talk about it. Either Metatron had killed him, which was the realistic theory, or he had been locked up in Heaven with the rest of the angels and _they_ had killed him, or they hadn’t, and it wouldn’t matter, because Heaven was still closed. And from what they could tell, it was pretty damn final.

He tried praying, a few times. Stupid, mundane stuff, the kind of stuff he’d gotten used to rambling about in Purgatory: old stories, or how his day was going, or an ever-growing list of reasons why Cas should get his ass in gear and come back already. After a day or two, though, Dean had to accept the fact that maybe, this time, Castiel wasn’t ever going to come back.

Which, of course, was absolutely _shit_ , because that meant that the last time they ever saw each other was in the parking lot of a tiny-ass bar with Cupid’s bloody severed hand in a bag and yelling at Naomi and yelling at each other, so firmly at odds that there was no turning back. Castiel had taken him to the church, so that he could be with Sam at the end of all things, and then he was gone.

Dean turns, again, glancing at the doorway down the hall where the djinn’s Cas had vanished, and sighs. Maybe this is a second chance, or something, so that he can actually say goodbye.

“Dean?” Charlie prompts.

He breathes deep. “No, no, we’re not fighting.”

* * *

Charlie doesn’t hang around for very long after they finish the movie. Cas migrates to one of the living room recliners almost immediately after her car leaves the driveway, which makes Dean slightly suspicious, given how insistent Charlie had been on his participation in whatever ‘game night’ was supposed to be happening.

The only sound between them for a few minutes is Cas tack-tacking away on his laptop, while Dean pretends to be interested in the two-week-old newspaper that was lying on the coffee table.

After a few unsubtle glances over his laptop screen, Cas eventually speaks up. “I thought you would have been at Benny’s by now.”

“Um.” Shit, Benny too? Looks like he’s gaining himself an entourage. “Would I?” Dean deflects.

Cas gives him a long-suffering look, glancing at the clock display on the DVD player. “Dean, I distinctly remember you telling me that you were helping him cover lunch today.”

Dean follows Cas’ eyes to the clock, which tells him it’s 11:02. “So, about that,” he hedges, getting up. “I was … just going?”

Cas raises his eyebrows, which doesn’t help at all with the Kirk and Spock thing, and Dean decides to just go. Quickly retreating to the study, Dean fires up the computer he had been using earlier so as to have some clue of what, exactly, “Benny’s” is.

It’s weird, though, he thinks, as he waits for the computer to boot up. Charlie’s easy to imagine in this reality, and he’s starting to understand how Cas fits in, but Benny was pretty damn one-of-a-kind even in real life. Obviously, he’s probably not gonna find his best friend still a vampire here, or a sea-plundering pirate, or a Purgatory headhunter. Which, honestly, takes away a lot of who he was, so it’s hard to call — hell, with a djinn-manipulation like this, anything could happen. Benny might be human. Shit, Benny could be a hunter. He can just picture Benny hacking away at demons with one of those ridiculous machetes they spent weeks perfecting in Purgatory.

Running a search on _Benny Lafitte_ brings up a lot of hits for a “Benny’s Corner”, which at first seems like a mistake, but it’s eventually clear that in this life Benny runs a low-traffic, out-of-the-way sandwich-and-coffee shop in Chenoa, Illinois. Makes sense: Dean remembers finding Benny working at a place in Louisiana when Martin had gone nuts about him. So here, it seems, Benny’s a restaurateur. Who fuckin’ knew.

It’s only 11 AM, anyway, and it sounds like he’s supposed to be there, so Dean decides to take Cas’ hint and pay the café a visit. It’s not incredibly far away, so he decides to walk. Cas doesn’t give a verbal response to his yell of “I’m going out!”, but the irritatedly affectionate look he received on the way out the door was answer enough.

Benny’s place, he finds, is fairly nondescript from the outside; its only distinguishing feature, a listing of the week’s specials, is scrawled on the window in bright paint, along with a schedule of when he’s open each day. Dean’s never seen the vampire’s handwriting — Purgatory, though it resembled wilderness camping, left little time for letters home — but the messily elegant script decorating the establishment could definitely have belonged to the Benny he knew.

A string of bells draped around the door handle jingles as Dean walks in, so the possibility of a subtle entrance is out. There’s only a few people inside, even with it being lunch hour: a pair of students hanging out in a back corner, one lanky scarf-and-beanie hipster by the window who almost reminds him of Sam, and an elderly couple at a table near the door. Benny’s engaged in some sort of lively conversation with the two spry old ladies, and he winks at Dean as he spots him coming in.

With nothing better to do while he waits for Benny’s attention, Dean ambles up to the counter. The menu looks pretty standard; he hasn’t eaten anything since a bowl of cereal that morning, but he doesn’t feel particularly hungry, and anyway, he feels like he’s supposed to be doing something useful.

“Y’here to eat, work, or torment me?” Benny drawls from behind him.

“Aw, do I have to pick?” Dean retorts, turning, falling into the banter that had become an art form as they picked their way through Purgatory.

“Hey, I ain’t judgin’, but you know you can’t stay for more than two hours without pickin’ up some of the work.”

Dean pretends affront. “Do I really stay _that_ long that often?”

Benny raises his eyebrows, moving to the other side of the counter to wash a mug. Dean grins. This, he could get used to. “Thought the whole reason I was here was to work, anyway,” he mentions, after a moment’s pause.

“Well,” Benny drawls, “as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’m not really all that busy right now.”

Dean glances around the room, and is inclined to agree. Having spotted a bookshelf in the corner, and not really feeling like walking back to the house, he decides to hang around for a while. Worst-case scenario, he gets to read for a while, and has to make up some sort of boring explanation to Cas about how his day went.

True to his word, Benny strides over to Dean’s table at the two-hour mark and drops a wet towel down on the polished wood. “Alright, get your butt in gear and start cleaning something. I’m closing up.”

Dean frowns. “It’s one-thirty.”

“And my name ends in Y,” Benny replies, already turning away. “The school’s on break, anyway, and it doesn’t really look like I’m gonna get anyone else in today, so might as well quit wasting your time and mine. Go home and —” he waves a hand in Dean’s direction — “cuddle with your boyfriend, or something.”

Dean doesn’t even acknowledge that with a response.

“What’s up with you and Hot Stuff, anyway?” Benny asks, as they’re standing outside after locking up. “Looks an awful lot like you’re in the doghouse to me.”

“The hell makes you think that?”

“Aw, man, you are, aren’t you? What now, he get tired of all the unresolved sexual tension hangin’ in the air over at that house?” Benny turns to dramatically address the world at large. “You’d think by now, surely, they’d have gotten their heads out of their asses and realized that I didn’t just set them up so they could share a bed and a house and wake up coughing ‘no homo’ at each other every morning _ad infinitum_.”

“You _set us up_?” Dean, as always, catches the relevant information.

Benny stares at him, incredulous. “Dean. Did you ever think that maybe there was a reason I kept calling you in to work for me twice a week, and that those just happened to be the mornings your buddy was there?”

“...No?” He wouldn’t put it past himself not to notice a stunt like that.

“I really don’t need a lot of help, brother. Good luck with your boyfriend, though. See you tomorrow.” Benny salutes him, and leaves.

Dean’s heard allegations along those lines before — “ _you know, the angel in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you_ ” and “ _he was your boyfriend first_ ” — but at the time they had been jabs, designed to shake him, throw him off his game. Even in Purgatory, he had endured the relentless teasing of the real Benny. It had been a bad decision, that night when everything had been going to shit and he had ended up confessing to Benny just why, exactly, he was so desperate to find the angel. He’d had the vampire’s sympathy for about an hour; after that, it was variations on “your long-lost angel boyfriend” the whole way down.

This, though. This is something else, and Dean doesn’t know how to name it.

He gets back to the house, and turns the TV on out of habit. It’s only after ten minutes of not paying any attention at all that he realizes he’s watching This Old House, and reruns, at that — and he only recognizes it because Sam had it on once, and he remembers one of the turns of phrase someone made, of course — and switches the channel away like he’s been caught with his pants down while wearing yellow Batman underwear.

Which he doesn’t, by the way. Anymore.

Once half of his second episode of crappy daytime something-or-other has gone by, Dean begins to have a sneaking suspicion that he’s being avoided. Cas is clearly still there, since the piece-of-shit car that Dean saw him driving is still there, and Dean can’t imagine Cas being the kind of guy that would have music on so loud that he wouldn’t notice that Dean was back. So, like the expert hunter Dean is, he decides to lure his prey out with food.

Burgers, Dean thinks, peering into their fridge. This Cas probably never went on a Famine-induced three-thousand-burger eating spree, but unless he’s some weird freak of nature, he should at least appreciate a good one. It takes him a bit to find everything he needs, and it’s a good thing no one was around to watch him trying to look for a pair of scissors in the spice cabinet, but he gets the frozen patties sizzling in a skillet before too long. Step 1: fill the house with the smoky, delicious scent of frying burgers. Step 2: locate the reclusive target and lure it out with the promise of a meal.

He finds Cas reading in the bedroom. His attempt at levity (“why don’t you come out of your cave, maybe we could, you know, _talk_ or something, I haven’t even gotten to see you practically all day”) goes over about as well as could be imagined; which is to say, Cas squints confusedly at him, but follows him back to the kitchen anyway. Score 1 to Dean Winchester.

Things only get more awkward from there. Cas starts working on some sort of salad, since apparently the one or two leaves of lettuce Dean was planning on adding to the burgers doesn’t count as vegetables, and for a while the only sound between them is the hissing of the pan on the stove and the regular snick-snick-snick of Cas chopping cucumbers. Cas, it turns out, is actually really good at cutting up stuff. Dean wonders idly if the Castiel he knew was ever as handy with a paring knife as he was with that sword.

Once they’ve managed to get the food on the table — an actual, honest-to-God dinner table, with a tablecloth and everything — Dean moves on to Step 3. Engage the target in conversation, without scaring it away and negating the results of the previous steps. This proves to be the most difficult part, as Cas seems doggedly determined not to speak more than about two words at a time.

“How was your day?”

“Pretty good.”

“Charlie and I watched Star Trek this morning.”

“I know.”

“Both she and Benny think you’re mad at me.”

“Mm.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Nope.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Cas huffs, but continues silently eating his salad. Dean, frustrated, reaches out and grabs his wrist, suspending the fork and lettuce in midair. A drop of salad dressing falls leisurely onto the plate.

“Cas. I don’t care if you’re pissed at me, but I need to know why.”

“Dean.” It’s a resigned but cooperative sound, and Dean checks off Step 3 as successful in his head. He releases Cas’ wrist, and Cas sets the fork back on his plate before speaking.

“Dean,” he repeats, “Believe me when I say I’m not angry with you.”

Dean nods. He’s not completely convinced, but he’s not going to push it.

* * *

Bed-sharing, Dean realizes, is awkward enough when you randomly wake up in an alternate reality to realize you’re bunking with a guy you weren’t expecting to ever see again, and especially not in this context. It’s even more awkward when said guy starts stripping down to his undershirt and boxers right in front of you, and then stares at you from the bed wondering why you’re not following suit.

Dean goes over to the dresser (the only one in the room, and it makes him wonder if he and Cas are sharing clothes, too) and rummages around until he finds a pair of sweatpants to change into. He’s never been a blushing prude, but sleeping in his underwear next to a guy he hasn’t even “done it” with is a little excessive, in his opinion. Cas watches him, expression unreadable, as he ducks into the bathroom to brush his teeth. Only when Dean finally, hesitating, slips in next to him, does Cas relax, turning over to flip off the light and plunging them both into darkness.

The next morning, Dean jolts awake to the lingering memory of a nightmare (huddled with Sam against the Impala, storm whipping around them, angels vanishing into the sky and demons into the earth, _Castiel—!_ ) and finds Cas, once again, gone. Another morning to himself, then.

He makes it to 9 AM without any unexpected visitors — he’s half-expecting Garth to drop out of the sky, or something, at this point — and only then realizes he’s managed so far to forget completely about Sam. The last time this djinn-thing happened, he and Sam were distant from and even a little resentful of each other, and the only reason they even met was for their mom’s birthday. Here, he’d been so caught up with getting to see Cas and the others again that he’d managed to neglect his own brother.

He forgot _Sam_. Shit, that’s terrifying. It was probably the djinn, anyway, sneaky little fucker, because there’s _no_ way he would have gone that long without worrying about his brother.

Isn’t there?

Dean tries calling all of Sam’s numbers, past and present, that he knows, but most of them belong to other people and the rest aren’t real. Next, he checks his contacts on the computer: there are names he expects, Cas’, Charlie’s, Benny’s, even some names he thinks were hunters he knew in real life, but no Sam, or any of Sam’s aliases. He even tries some of his own aliases, but nothing remotely related ever shows.

Google is equally unhelpful; there are dozens of Sam Winchesters on Facebook, Twitter, and mentioned on various news sites, but none of them are anything like his brother. Eventually, tucked away on page 23 of the results, is a fan-forum for the discontinued book series _Supernatural_ , with a discussion of what their “head-canons” for the main characters’ last name were. How did _those_ find their way into his head?

Finally he strikes gold. Returning to his previous search for himself, he finds Mary Winchester’s obituary. Reading past all the “wonderful person, loving wife and mother” boilerplate, he finds:

 _Mary’s life and the life of her unborn child were taken by a tragic house fire this past Saturday. She is survived by her husband John, 31_ , _and son Dean, 3._

Funeral arrangements and flower deliveries to follow, but the point is clear. Sam never even _lived_.

Dean’s about ready to find a butcher knife in the kitchen and commit hara-kiri right then and there, but it seems like it would be a bit Romeo and Juliet to explain to Sam when he got back, so he refrains.

Still though. Fuckin’ weird. Sam has been pretty much his entire life, for so many years, and if Sam doesn’t even exist here, then who is he?

The rest of the day passes with much less drama. Cas gets back soon after lunch, again, and even humors Dean by sitting down and watching DVR’d episodes of _Doctor Sexy, M.D._ with him for a while, though he makes no effort to care about the plot, and even Dean grows a bit tired of it after a couple of episodes. Once you’ve been through a few apocalypses, the cheap will-they/won’t-they suspense between the hot lesbian nurses seems a bit lackluster in comparison.

Besides, he’s even got his own relationship drama happening right here and now, he thinks, glancing over at Cas beside him. Will they, won’t they, indeed.

* * *

“You are coming, right?” Dean remembers to ask, head buried in the fridge as he searches for something he can bring over to Charlie’s. She didn’t ask, per se, but it’s probably the least douchey thing to do.

“I had no other plans,” Cas replies, Spock-like, from somewhere behind him. “Good,” Dean replies, straightening up and turning around to find himself —

— nose to nose with Cas. Okay. _We’ve talked about this: personal space_ , echoes in his mind. Obviously, he and this Cas haven’t had that discussion yet.

“Cas. Personal bubble, man,” Dean reminds him, waving the hand that’s not holding a 2-liter of soda to illustrate the distance between them; it’s definitely less than a foot. Cas backs off obediently, though his expression falls a little. Dean checks to make sure he didn’t accidentally step on the guy’s toe or anything, and shrugs it off.

Charlie’s apartment is small, but comfortable; it reminds Dean a little bit of the place they first met her. Benny’s there when Dean and Cas arrive, which Dean, in retrospect, probably should have expected. He never got to introduce Benny properly to any of his other friends topside; although, all his friends were hunters, so it probably wouldn’t have gone well anyway. Here, Benny and Charlie look like old friends. They pause their argument about whether the Halo or Call of Duty franchise is better just long enough to acknowledge Dean and Cas’s presence, and then blithely carry on. Brother and sister, Dean thinks. A family that could have been.

They end up playing a game called Portal, a sci-fi puzzle thing, switching off partners after every couple of puzzles. Dean remembers the game from having played it a few times with Ben; the kid had been so excited when it had come out, and Dean had bought it for his birthday. Then, once Ben had exhausted the game’s single-player campaign, he had drafted Dean to play the multiplayer with him. That had been about two weeks before Sam showed up, and one of the first times Dean and Ben had been anything but stiltedly awkward around each other. Lisa had always sworn up and down that Ben wasn’t Dean’s son, but Dean had known better.

As they play, it becomes clear that Charlie’s an expert, and has played the game many times before. Cas is also pretty decent, though whether it’s from previous experience or just the guy’s innate ability to be really good at everything, Dean doesn’t know. He and Benny, on the other hand, are both _terrible_ , and the first time they’re paired together they both end up dying half a dozen times before completing the chamber. Charlie keeps trying to give them advice, but through her helpless giggles at their incompetence nobody understands a word.

Dean can’t help but notice, as they’re playing, that he and Cas make an absolutely _awful_ team. It’s not like he has experience to speak from — he’s never had any spare time to spend playing games, let alone with his brother or Cas — but they’re definitely supposed to be more coordinated than this. Fighting together in Purgatory had never been action-movie slick, but there was a sort of natural rhythm between the three of them as they sliced and stabbed and smote their way through the endless forest. Here, though, somewhere between Dean’s clumsiness with the controls and a mutual lack of communication, they’re not even failing in a funny way; what should be easy-to-solve puzzles turn into bickering (“ _dammit_ , Cas, you were supposed to turn off the lasers” — “it’s hardly my fault that you jumped too soon”).

It was only after their fifth try at one particularly difficult level, the crux of which involved Dean’s robot lazily sailing through the air over a pit of acid while Cas ran around pressing buttons to ensure his safe landing, that they manage to beat it. Dean whoops in victory, pumping his controller into the air, and momentarily forgetting himself, slaps Cas joyfully on the shoulder. “God, Cas, that was sweet. I could almost _kiss_ you for that, _dude_ , wow —”

“Only almost?” Benny jokes.

Benny takes over from Dean to play the next level with Cas, and the first thing he manages to do upon entering the chamber is press the wrong button and accidentally flip himself off the edge of the platform. Despite Dean and Cas’ utter failure as a pair, they all enjoy the evening, and it’s not until nearly one in the morning that they finally leave. Next time, Benny swears, he gets to pick the game.

The pleasant mood dissipates as soon as he and Cas are alone in the Impala, however. Cas’s posture is stiff, and it feels like the temperature in the car has dropped a few degrees; Dean’s first instinct is to reach for the EMF meter that’s supposed to be in the glovebox. He swings them carefully away from Charlie’s apartment building, expecting some sort of outburst, but Cas remains silent. The silence lasts the whole drive back to their house; Cas’ staring determinedly through the windshield is so distracting that Dean almost forgets the route he’d carefully memorized earlier in the day.

They pull into the driveway, but just as Cas is about to get out, Dean flicks the switch to lock the doors. “Cas.”

“Dean. Let me out.” Cas is clearly annoyed.

“Nope. Not until you tell me why you’re giving me the silent treatment.”

“I can unlock my own door.”

“I’ll lock it back. I’m fast.”

Cas huffs.

“Is this about that stupid thing I said earlier? You know I didn’t mean it.”

“You didn’t mean it,” Cas repeats. “Do you expect that to comfort me?”

“Um.” Dean replays the scene in his head: winning the level, his admittedly judgment-impaired celebration, and _shit_ , he can’t even remember what his exact words had been.

Cas shakes his head. “Clearly. Let me out.”

“No.”

“Dean, this isn’t the time for this conversation.”

“Well, tough.”

They stare each other down for an uncomfortably long time, and then Cas turns to stare at the windshield.

“Alright. You want to hear why I’m, as you say, ‘pissed’ at you? Because you had me convinced we were going somewhere.”

“We just went to Charlie’s, dude —” Dean attempts, plastering on Shit-Eating Smirk #4.

“Dean, _shut up_ ,” Cas spits, and Dean shuts up immediately. “You’ve been living with me for almost a month,” Cas continues, tone icy, “and in that time our relationship has stagnated to the point of nonexistence. You seem under the impression that you can share my bed and my house but still treat me like any other of your friends; you joke about kissing me but you put up walls whenever I so much as touch you.”

The outburst leaves Dean speechless.

“You have to make up your mind. Are we in a relationship or not, Dean?”

“Cas —”

“Decide.” Cas turns, unlocks his door and stalks into the house. Dean stays in the car for a very, very long time.

 


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning, Dean makes it into the house for just long enough to grab a change of clothes, and then flees to Charlie’s place. She was expecting him, it seems; when he arrives, there’s already breakfast set out for two.

“Was it really that obvious?” Dean finally asks, midway through pouring himself a bowl of cereal. “I mean, that something was gonna happen?”

Charlie sighs. “Dean, anyone could see that fight coming from miles away.”

“Don’t —” Dean points a spoon at her — “say I told you so.” She doesn’t.

It’s only when they’ve finished eating, and Dean is staring into the abyss of Winnie-the-Pooh’s jolly, milk-splotched face at the bottom of his cereal bowl, that Charlie breaks the silence. “So, you wanna talk about it?”

He continues staring moodily, so she continues. “Well. I don’t know specifically what the problem is, but I bet I can guess. Cas wants your relationship to go long-term, but you’re scared of commitments, so you’re defaulting to your Dean Winchester _modus operandi_ and trying to treat him like a friend.”

“I’m not —”

“Bullshit, Dean. I’ve known you since high school, you can’t lie to me.” Charlie gets up from the table, clearing her dishes and putting the cereal boxes away. “Do you know how many partners you’ve had that lasted more than a week?”

“I’ve —”

“One. One, Dean. You fell in love with her, and she dumped you, and you, moody teenager that you were, decided never to let your heart get broken again. I can count the number of actual friends you have on one hand, by the way, and that’s not healthy.”

“I —”

“And now you’ve got something with Cas. I could see from the start that you two were just —” she waves her hand vaguely — “meant to be, somehow. And you’re afraid of that. You’re scared that you’re attached to him, so your defense is to put him in a ‘friend’ category instead, because you think you know how to deal with friends.”

“I’m —”

“Dean.”

Dean finally breaks Pooh’s unending gaze, and looks up at her. “Yeah.”

“Don’t throw this away because you’ve never been in love with a guy before.”

“I’ve been with guys before,” he protests, but it doesn’t carry any weight.

“That’s not what I said, Dean.”

“I know I’m bi, okay? I’ve known since, like, college. I just —”

“I met your dad, you know.”

“What?”

“I know how he raised you. The whole macho-man-in-training thing you had going on, I remember it. You were drinking beer by the time you were in middle school, going hunting every year, you were on the football team.”

At Dean’s half-defensive, half-lost look, Charlie softens her voice. “There wasn’t a lot of tolerance in Kansas.”

“What, now, so you think I’m homophobic, or something?”

“Again: not what I said.” Charlie picks up his bowl and starts wiping the table off with a towel. “But I know deep down you probably still think you’re supposed to end up with a girl for your happily ever after.”

Dean can’t argue with that.

It’s true, he has known for years that he’s attracted to guys just as much as girls — he’s never told Sam, but the kid’s smart enough that he probably knew even before Dean did. His experimentation phase had mostly been while Sam was off at Stanford, when John started to let him take more hunts on his own and there wasn’t a careful eye watching to see which gender he brought home each night from the local bar. But he’d never considered actually staying with a guy for more than a night. Cassie he’d gone out with for a while, and Lisa he’d even lived with, but other than that he’d never even had any long-term girlfriends that he can think of, let alone any guys.

Then Castiel —

For a while, Castiel had just been an ally. Ever since that conversation after Samhain (“ _Can I tell you something if you promise not to tell another soul?_ ”), Dean had kept an eye on him, knowing there was someone in Heaven’s ranks that he could count on in a pinch.

And then pinch came to tug, and Castiel was brainwashed, or something, and it would have been just as natural a trick to sneak the guy’s angel blade and try and force Castiel to let him out — but Dean saw the lingering doubt in Castiel’s eyes, and pulled the other patented Dean Winchester coercion technique. A carefully-constructed argument, from one helpless minion to another, poking the angel where he knew it would hurt (“ _it’s all a bunch of lies, it’s just a way for your bosses to keep me and keep you in line_ ”), and it paid off; not quite in time, but Castiel was on their side, just in time to die protecting Dean from the archangel.

He’s still not sure what possessed him to say it — “ _learned that from my friend Cas, you son of a bitch_ ” — but it had become true. Castiel, unlikely as it seemed, had become his friend. They still didn’t see eye to eye most of the time, and, with the stresses of the Judeo-Christian apocalypse itself and Cas’ powers rapidly fading, there was even less time to just be around each other. There wasn’t much anyone could do those days, for a spiraling angel or for any of them, but there was some comfort to be taken in having someone around who was feeling just as shitty as you were.

Castiel had died again in the showdown with Lucifer. When he was brought back, he’d been changed, somehow, and not just in that he had his powers back. He was amped up on some sense of victory, Dean thought, and had flown off to try and take charge of Heaven without remembering that Dean had still lost Sam. There hadn’t been so much as a goodbye, or a promise to visit sometime, and Dean had shown up on Lisa’s doorstep with two gaping wounds in his chest that she and Ben couldn’t even start to fill.

He’d started to realize, somewhere around the time that Castiel died again, that this was someone he wasn’t going to be able to move on from. The loss he felt when he thought the angel was dead (“ _maybe angels don’t need to breathe?_ ”) and when, afterward, he was sure (“ _okay, so — so he’s gone_ ”) was greater than he’d remembered in a long time. Even Bobby and Sam had picked up on it and tried to give him time to deal with his _feelings_ , or something.

It took him a while to come to terms with it. By the time they got to Purgatory, though, Dean knew he was in love with Castiel. He also knew nothing was ever going to come of it, so there wasn’t much point in brooding. It was what it was, and he could deal with it. As long as he didn’t ever slip and tell him (“ _we’re family; we need you; I need you —”_ ), they could still be friends, like they had been.

He’d thought about saying it. Hell, if he hadn’t been so absolutely _pissed_ at Cas after he had reappeared in front of them with blood all over his shirt and expected them to help him, Dean would probably have told him. And then the shit hit, like, five different fans, and by the time they all came back to their senses the angel was gone. Angels. Every fucking angel locked up in Heaven, and Cas either dead, soon to be dead or trapped with them forever; Dean wasn’t letting himself hope for a second (or third, fourth, fifth) chance. Not this time.

In any case, he’d never told Cas. He’d moped about it for about an hour, while Sam was sleeping in the car and he was left alone with his Baby purring beneath him and the black expanses of the 3 AM Oklahoma highway before him. Then Sam had started hacking out his lungs and running a fever to challenge the fires of Hell and Dean hadn’t had the luxury of worrying about Castiel anymore. With his brother under the weather, his own problems had to take the metaphorical back seat.

Even if Charlie was talking about the life of a different Dean Winchester (for one thing, he never played football), her point was good. Dean’s always been well-aware of his inability to hold down a relationship: he and Lisa lasted a little over a year, but he’ll be the first to tell you that what they had was eighty percent mutual wishful thinking. Castiel is — or was; tenses don’t mean a lot anymore — the longest-lasting real friendship Dean’s ever had, and he’s not ready to jeopardize that just because the guy’s hot and he has a stupid middle-school crush.

Charlie returns, breaking Dean’s train of thought. “Is it gonna be one of those days where you just sit at my kitchen table moping all morning? ‘Cause it’s, like, 10 AM, and I need to know if you’re good.”

Dean stands and rubs a hand over his face. “No. No, I think I’m good, I’ll get out of your way. Thanks, for, you know.” He gestures vaguely to the table.

“Anytime, dumbo.” She slaps him on the shoulder, and ushers him out.

 

* * *

 

Before he goes back to the house, Dean decides to make a grocery run. He didn’t see any beer when he was poking around in the fridge the night before, and if he’s going to go back and try to deal with Cas, he wants to make sure he has the option to get himself nice and buzzed if it goes south.

The only place he finds in town is a little grocery store that looks like it got both its logo and its last paint job in the ‘70s. On his way in, he passes a teenager carrying bags for an elderly lady, and by the time he gets back to the fridge section at the back of the store, he’s seen a mom with three children and a pair of priests, and he’s almost regretting trying to come here to buy something as uncouth as alcohol.

Still, he grabs a six-pack and makes his way back to the front of the store, and he almost makes it out without incident until he sees the cashier in the “10 Items or Less” aisle. Her hair is different than he remembers, shorter and pulled back into a ponytail, and she’s a little older, but it’s definitely Jo. He wonders briefly why _she_ of all people would show up here; maybe it’s some sort of poke at his failed romantic past, or something, but he decides it’s probably best not to question it.

She checks him through efficiently, like the customers before him, and Dean wonders if she even recognized him. “Hey, Jo,” he starts, but she gives him a look that signals she’s heard attempts at flirting from pathetic mortals like him before and she’s tired of it.

“Jo, it’s Dean,” he tries again, leaning toward her over the end of the counter, and she glances from him to his beer before turning her attention back to the lady she’s currently scanning two boxes of cat litter for. “Have a nice day, _Dean_ ,” she says clearly, still keeping her attention focused on her work.

And because he _really_ doesn’t want to get himself on the hit list of a Harvelle, he takes the hint, and leaves.

 

* * *

 

Cas is in the living room with a laptop when he gets home, and Dean beelines for the safety of the kitchen to put his beer away.

He’s standing in front of the fridge, seeing the library fliers and restaurant coupons hanging from neatly arranged little magnet clips, and suddenly something shifts and Dean suddenly realizes how very crudely out of place he is in this fantasy universe. He and his fuckups and insecurities charged in and got his dirty paws all over a clean new world: in the span of three days, he’s already managed to screw up his relationship with Cas, dump his big bag of issues on Charlie, and make an awful probably-first impression on Jo.

And it’s not like he’s expecting a djinn-dream to be, like, Paradise-perfect — he’s seen one version of Paradise, anyway, and it was more dystopia than utopia, if you ask him. He’s done this gig before, too, back when his dream-family was his mom alive and his brother with Jessica and a model for his girlfriend, but he’d soon found out that that reality was crap. His brother hated him, his mom probably thought he was a weirdo, and a shit-ton of people had died that he and Sam hadn’t saved because they hadn’t grown up hunters.

This place is something else entirely, though. Maybe his expectations have changed, or something, because this reality — as incredible as it is to have Benny and Cas alive, and Charlie around, and the semblance of a stable life — isn’t problem-free. It’s not _bad_ , or anything, but he’s getting the idea that if he wants to keep this thing running he’s going to have to work for it.

Which is, really, kind of okay. It’s not like Dean isn’t used to working for what he wants; he’s rarely had an honest job for very long at a time, but even hustling pool and stealing credit cards takes no small amount of skill. The idea of having a home with Cas is frankly pretty damn appealing, and if he can just work things out with the guy —

Cas appears behind him, having probably slunk in while he was contemplating the refrigerator. “Dean?” he asks.

Dean spins to face him. “Yeah, Cas?”

Cas eyes him warily. “You weren’t here this morning.”

“I, uh, went to Charlie’s. Needed to think.” Dean tries to reach into the fridge for one of those beers, figuring now if ever is the time to introduce alcohol into this conversation. By trying to find it without looking, however, he knocks over a bottle of salad dressing, which in turn knocks a tub of margarine onto the floor. So much for an attempt at subtlety.

After he’s done picking up after himself, and still without a beer, and with Cas still staring at him with an expression that reads somewhere between annoyed to hell and reluctantly amused, Dean motions Cas to follow him into the living room. “We should probably talk,” he explains. Cas picks the seat diametrically opposite and farthest from Dean’s, so they’re off to a roaring start.

Fuck, he’s gonna have to do this completely sober, Dean thinks. Purgatory did wonders for him — even Benny doesn’t know about those first weeks he spent in withdrawal, weak, always on the run and puking up everything he’d eaten in the last year — and his highly-refined tolerance has slipped some, but booze is still a damn good coping mechanism when everything is coming up shit.

Cas is staring. Right. He’s supposed to be talking. “Um,” he begins eloquently. “Cas, I’m not good at this.”

“Dean, right now anything would be progress,” Cas quips dryly. Note to self: Cas is still _pissed_.

“Look, I — I want to do this, okay? You and me. I’m on board.”

Cas raises his eyebrows. “But?”

“But I’ve never really done this before. The whole — long-term thing. It doesn’t usually work for me.”

“Why?” _Christ_ , is he really going to make him spell it out?

“Everyone I get involved with, they —” get caught in the crossfire, he wants to say, thinking of Cassie and Lisa.

“Dump you,” Cas finishes, a hint of amusement on his face. “You’re afraid I’m going to _dump you_.”

“No, come on, man,” Dean protests, because that sounds really, _really_ lame out loud.

“Then what?” Cas retorts. Dean doesn’t really have a good answer, other than ‘you always end up leaving or dying’, but that doesn’t even apply here. This Cas, staring at him from across a tidy living room with his hands folded neatly on his knees, has obviously never died before. Nor can he zap away whenever he doesn’t want to give Dean a straight answer, Dean realizes with excitement, a back corner of his mind already scheming up ways to corner him with all the questions he never got to ask before.

Cas gets up, and Dean thinks that wasn’t very much of a conversation. He’s not sure what he was expecting; it’s not like they were leading up to passionate declarations of love or some sort of big emotional showdown, but that only took, like, a minute and a half. Still, the air feels a little lighter in the house, and he’s less convinced Cas is going to kick him out at any moment, so at least they accomplished something.

 


	3. Chapter 3

Dean wakes up from a nap on the couch — after all, sleeping in the Impala, no matter how many times he’s done it, never gets any more comfortable, and he probably only got about two hours of sleep total last night — with an epiphany. There was a movie theater at the mall he passed in his search for a grocery store, he remembers, and if this universe parallels his own, there was a new _Star Trek_ movie he was meaning to see.

It takes a little convincing to get Cas on board with his plan, since the new and improved version seems about as culturally blind as the original, but he eventually agrees. They get there in time for a 3:30 showing, and the theater is thankfully only moderately busy, despite being a Saturday afternoon.

Cas gets up, abruptly, during a lull in the movie, and leaves. Dean panics momentarily — _shit_ , Cas is leaving, was this a bad idea, does he not like the movie, if he takes the car how am I going to get out of here — before realizing that nature’s call is a far more likely explanation. Rationally, he knows Cas wouldn’t leave with his car, and that he can’t even angel-zap away when he gets bored, but it’s still a major relief when Dean spots him returning.

As Cas edges back into their row, a bucket of popcorn in hand, Dean suddenly realizes just how much affection he still harbors for the guy. Sure, their conversations for the last several days have been about the relationship between them, and how they’re both looking to be more-than-friends, but it’s been so long since he’s had the luxury of actually _liking_ Cas that it almost bowls him over.

Last time he had popcorn with Cas, he had made it as a joke; watching old film reels of crazy magic exorcisms had seemed an absurd enough occasion for snack food. Castiel had followed him into the kitchen like an inquisitive kid, watching Dean’s every move and occasionally asking what, exactly, Dean was doing, or why ( _“it’s tradition, Cas_ ” “ _why?_ ” “ _man_ , _I don’t know, it just is_ ”), and when they got into the room where Sam had been waiting with the projector, Castiel was the only one of the three who actually ate any. Dean had found it very hard that afternoon to keep up the façade of being mad at him, because, honestly, Castiel, badass-angel-of-the-Lord eating popcorn? _Adorable_ , whatever the context.

Cas makes it back to their seats and sits down next to him, passing over the popcorn as if it were some sort of peace offering. Dean sets it on the armrest between them, and after it becomes obvious that leaving it there will lead to nearly-certain disaster, puts it back on Cas’ lap. Cas frowns, and returns it to Dean’s lap, holding it there when Dean tries to move it back again. Dean swats futilely at Cas’ hand, and then realizing that they’re basically fighting like children, freezes, looking at Cas for help.

Unfortunately, it appears Cas has just come to the same conclusion, and the minute they make eye contact, Dean breaks out in silent, helpless laughter, while Cas smiles wide; practically rolling on the floor in hysterics by his standards. A girl behind them coughs, and they both snap their attention back to the movie in front of them as Dean struggles to keep himself together.

Something — whether the boldness induced by a dark theater, or the good mood Dean’s in, or the way Cas is still smiling even as his eyes are focused on the screen —  prompts Dean to do probably the dumbest thing he’s ever pulled in his entire life. Lifting his arm back from where it was lingering near Cas’ wrist, Dean shifts in his seat and, skipping any pretense of the yawn-and-stretch, slides his arm around Cas’ shoulders. Cas tenses up at the sudden touch, but Dean just uses his other hand to grab a handful of popcorn out of the bucket, eyes still tracking the movements of the fight scene unfolding in front of them, and eventually Cas relaxes back against him. Cuddling in movie theater seats is awkward as hell, and Dean’s arm goes to sleep after five minutes, but he’s determined, and they finish out the movie like high schoolers who’ve just discovered the concept of PDA.

On their way through the parking lot, Cas suggests, “Dinner?”

“Isn’t ‘dinner and a movie’ supposed to start with the dinner?” Dean teases, and Cas rolls his eyes. “Sorry to disappoint,” he grumbles.

Dean flicks him on the shoulder. “No, Cas, it’s a good idea. What place?”

After some deliberation and Cas looking up maps on the phone Dean didn’t know he had, they pick a local buffet place just down the road. It’s a small but seemingly well-established place, nestled into a half-abandoned strip mall, and at six on a Saturday evening there’s something of a challenge to find a space to park.

The inside of the restaurant, disparately unlike the standard gray-concrete exterior, is warm. A rock fountain bubbles away excitedly from the corner next to the door, and a hand-drawn blackboard sign posted in front of them lists the prices and daily menu items. A woman with a name tag proclaiming “AUNT BETH” in glittery stickers greets them, and, glancing between them after Cas says, “Just two,” leads them to a somewhat secluded table near the wall at the back of the room.

“How long have you two been together?” she asks, as she sets the table for them.

They glance at each other, and Cas answers: “Just over a month.”

“Congratulations!” she offers, like it’s some sort of accomplishment. Maybe it is.

Neither of them eat a lot, though Dean spends a disproportionate amount of time sampling the pies at the dessert bar; the apple and cherry are somewhat disappointing, but the strawberry-rhubarb, which he caught having just been brought from the kitchen, is warm and surprisingly tasty. Cas starts to look at him funny after Dean returns from his second trip carrying only dessert, and after his third (but come on, there was _banana pudding_ , and that’s not something you can just ignore), Cas, still working his way through a chicken wing, comes out with it.

“What’s with the —” Cas gestures with a bone — “all the dessert? You barely even ate any real food.”

Dean can’t decide whether to passive-aggressively fire back ‘you’re not my mom’ or ‘it is _too_ real food’, and opts for just kind of primal-grunt-whining across the table. Cas squints at him as he sits down. “I like pie, alright?” Dean whines, getting a deeper frown in return.

“That’s pudding,” Cas points out, helpfully.

“Thanks, Spock,” Dean mutters, digging in. Cas shakes his head, giving up the argument, and returns to his chicken.

And to be honest, Dean hasn’t been _that_ into pie for years, now, but it’s sort of become autopilot by this point to beeline for the dessert table, some sort of conditioning from years of questionable eating habits to dig into the richest thing he can find. Right now, he’s already regretting not going for more actual, nutritious food, but carpe diem. When in Rome, eat like your brother isn’t looking. And all that.

They head home without hanging around too long; there’s not actually that much for the two of them to talk about, given Dean’s lack of knowledge of literally anything about Cas or this town or his own life, and Dean’s not interested in running headfirst into that fact. So if he sort of hurries them along at any opportunity for casual conversation, it’s not _just_ because he’s a dick.

They get back, and Dean stays outside on the porch, waiting, as Cas retrieves the book he had been reading earlier from the Adirondack chair; neither of them seems exceptionally eager to go inside.

“Is this the part where you walk me to my door and kiss me goodnight?” Dean jokes, though it slides past ‘teasing’ into something closer to ‘desperate’.

Cas smiles softly. “I’m not sure we’re quite at that point, Dean.”

Dean shoves his hands in his pockets, feeling reality settle over them like a giant, awkward blanket. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Cas replies, and Dean huffs. “I mean it. I just don’t want you to think you have to overcompensate.”

“Okay.” Dean nods, a little subdued, and Cas actually chuckles at him. “I’m not rejecting you, Dean. You just need to have patience.” He leans forward, stretching up a little on his toes, gently kisses Dean’s hairline, and goes into the house.

Dean stares after him, all brain functions skidding to a screeching halt like a ten-car pileup at an intersection. One annoying little neuron somewhere in there is replaying the tickle of Cas’ lips against his hair over and over again on an infinite loop that’s driving him into some weird limbo between numb and hyperaware. Maybe this is something he and this Cas are supposed to be used to, but — holy shit, Cas kissed him. On the head, but still. Cas kissed him? Holy _shit_.

No, screw this. Charlie was right, he’s way too chicken to actually get into a relationship. He’ll goof around with Cas, and play out the whole date game, but now that they’re off the script, it’s terrifying to actually confront his own complete ignorance of how to make a relationship work. Besides, Cas is probably way better at this than he is, and he probably expects Dean to be an actual functioning adult who can handle something as normal as an interpersonal relationship without fucking up, and —

Dean sits down on the bench, fumbling in his pocket for his phone, and blindly calls the first number he finds. It rings three times, and he forces himself to breathe three times, and then a voice sounds in his ear. “Hello?”

He breathes again. The voice — he recognizes it now, it’s Benny — comes through again. “Dean?”

“Hey,” he tries, but he’s not sure if it comes out or not. He takes another breath. “Hey, Benny.”

“Dean, what’s wrong?” Benny sounds concerned. God, is he that bad? He breathes deep one more time, and tries again.

“He kissed me.” It comes out as a fucking _squeak_ , and Dean drops his head into his other hand. So much for dignity, then. He really hopes Cas isn’t watching him from inside.

Benny is quiet a moment, and then asks: “Wanna say that again?”

“He kissed me. Cas— Cas kissed me.” Dean’s voice, at least, is steady this time.

“Alright.” There’s a few too many seconds of silence, and Dean almost thinks Benny’s hung up on him; probably what he’d do, honestly. Just as he’s about to hang up, himself, Benny’s voice filters back through the speaker. “Sorry, brother. Needed a little bit more privacy for this. You say he kissed you?”

“Quit making fun of me.”

“Never would,” Benny replies. “Was there any tongue?”

“Benny!” Dean whines into the phone, but then adds, “It wasn’t like — it was just on the head.”

“Uh-huh — and you’re calling me because?” Benny prompts.

“It’s never happened before!”

“What, really?”

Dean decides not to repeat himself; he’s not interested in handing over any more blackmail material than absolutely necessary.

Benny whistles, a harsh, tinny sound through the phone. “You really weren’t kidding, then. I thought you were just playing clueless the other day.”

“What?”

“I mean, you sound like you’re telling me you _actually_ didn’t know the guy was in love with you.”

If the despairing noise that comes out of Dean’s mouth is any indication —

“Look. Dean. Sleep on it, brother, and if you’re still out of your head in the morning, you know where I’ll be at.”

“Where’s that?”

“The café, you dumb catfish. Remember what I said.” The call ends.

Dean stares at the phone, which is blinking ‘ELAPSED TIME: 06:03’ over and over at him, until he notices the numbers above it. 8:57 PM — he’s not sure at what point they wasted so much time that it’s this far gone in the evening, and he could’ve sworn it wasn’t dark outside when he and Cas had gotten back.

He’s so focused on trying to remember how, exactly, their time had been spent, that he wanders into the house without any forethought whatsoever and finds Cas staring at him from the couch. The couch directly opposite the front window, which aside from a thin sheer curtain and a twisted-open Venetian blind has a perfect view of the porch. Dean tries to read Cas’ face, hoping to glean some idea of at least how much Cas saw and heard by his reaction, but finds nothing.

The evening passes without further incident: Cas reads, Dean showers, and they both independently turn in around ten o’clock. It seems Cas is willing to let Dean share the bed again, and though they don’t say much to each other beyond a pair of mumbled “g‘night”s, they aren’t passive-aggressively fighting over the blankets, either. Dean falls asleep staring at the end table, because looking at someone while they’re sleeping is creepy, but watching someone _fall_ asleep is weird as hell. He tracks the second hand on the clock around and around and around until finally around midnight he falls asleep himself.

 

* * *

_A dock. A lake. You are fishing, but your reel has no line. A frog jumps into the water. A hawk dives to catch the frog in its claws, and returns to its post atop a tree._

_It is dark, but there are no clouds. The sun is in your eyes. You squint your eyes against the darkness and wish you had packed sunglasses. There is no breeze._

_The water ripples beneath you. You look down: there are shadows flickering on the bottom of the lake, but you see no fish. The air is cold. You are wearing an old t-shirt that reads “TREK YOURSELF BEFORE YOU WRECK YOURSELF.” It is midday. It is dark. You are cold._

_You look to your right. There is no one there. Castiel is sitting beside you in a green canvas lawn chair. He is fishing. His hands are empty. The bobber on his string dances in the water. He is telling you about his day._

_You ask him what his favorite animal is. He tells you, ‘I had a cat when I was younger,’ but it comes out in Morse code. You learned Morse code in fourth grade and used it to talk across the back seat to Sam for three weeks. You tell him this. He says in Spanish that he didn’t know you had a brother._

_You look to your left. Cas is standing beside you with his arms folded. The tan trenchcoat is too small around his shoulders. He is not fishing. His face is swollen. You want to comb his hair. He is wearing the AC/DC shirt that you found in a giveaway bin at a church in Arkansas when you were seventeen. You ask him why he has it, but he cannot look at you._

_You look to your right. Castiel takes your hand. He is telling you about his mother. Your fingers lace through his, and they do not fit. His hand is blue. You look up and tell him he is sick. He tells you in Arabic that he is not. You look down. His hand is glowing. You take your hand away from his, but he keeps talking._

_You look to your left. Cas is kneeling on the dock. In his hands he cradles the frog. It is dead. He bows his head and kisses it. It is alive. You tell him he didn’t do it right because it’s still a frog. He does not look at you. The frog is not a prince. Cas drops it into the water, and it swims away. He recites, ‘Meet me here. Go now.’ You tell him you don’t know where ‘here’ is. There is no paper._

_You look to your right. Castiel’s legs are crossed. He is wearing shorts. His legs are pale. You do not ask him for the address. You look to your left. Cas has disappeared. The darkness is blinding you._

_You stand up from your chair. It is plastic. The fishing pole clatters onto the dock. The dock is metal. ‘Cas!’ you yell. ‘Where do I meet you? Castiel!’_

_Castiel stands up from his chair. He stops talking about his job, and reminds you in sign language that he is still right here._

_The dock is not connected to the land. You have no boat. You take off your shoes and dive into the water. It burns you._

_There is nothing at the bottom of the lake. You are being pulled downward._

_The water is lightning blue._

* * *

 

Dean startles awake. The alarm clock, ticking merrily in front of him, tells him it’s 5:38 AM. It’s still a little early for domestic little boys and girls to be awake on a Sunday morning, he thinks, but as he’s settling in to try for another hour or two, he registers a warm solidness against his back that was _definitely_ not there when he fell asleep.

It’s Cas, he realizes, after a minute. Somehow, in the night, the two of them had shifted, and now instead of cleanly segregated to each side of the bed, his back is pressed pretty much full flush against Cas’s. It feels nice, actually, to have the extra shared warmth, but then again, it also means that their butts are basically touching, which is super weird.

Dean tries to squirm away, assuming Cas is still blissfully asleep, but the movement is jarring enough that he can feel Cas tensing up behind him. Cas, still sound asleep, takes a deep breath, settles back against Dean, and curls a leg back to where his ankle is nestled between Dean’s calves. His foot is cold, Dean observes, and now their butts are _definitely_ touching. _Super_ weird.

Of course, it’s completely impossible to fall asleep after that, so Dean does his best not to think about Cas’ butt or foot or shoulders pressing into his, and suffers in silence for the next hour and a half until Cas’ alarm goes off. It’s the perfect excuse to quickly shift himself away from the middle of the bed and reestablish his initial position on his own side, though extracting his right leg out from under Cas’ ankle is a delicate trick.

Dean pushes himself up to lean against the headboard as Cas stirs. They make eye contact briefly when Cas pushes his head out from under the covers, and the look they share indicates clearly that they are both fully conscious of the quasi-cuddling that just took place. Awkwardness, thy name is Winchester, Dean thinks. He beats a hasty retreat to the bathroom, pouring a glass of water into the toilet and flushing so that at least he can prove he really needed to go if he has to.

They eat frozen waffles for breakfast, Dean much more enthusiastically than Cas — frozen anything was the _shit_ when he was a kid, especially if you could get the ones with cool designs on them. He’s in the middle of wolfing down his third waffle in five minutes when, out of a reflex politeness, he glances up at Cas, trying to remember what it was they had been talking about, and his eyes fall on Cas’ shirt. It’s dark, soft, and over the paraphernalia on the table he can make out the cracked letters of AC/DC across the front.

The dream, previously a haze of vague fear and weirdness, rushes back to him like a flood. It’s a shirt he remembers as being so strongly _his_ , in his youth, a shirt he wouldn’t even let Sam touch because it was, for several months, his most prized possession, even over all of his weapons. And he knows it’s not a reproduction of his shirt, certainly, because it got ripped to shreds years ago by a wendigo. But even knowing that, it’s really starting to mess with him to see Cas wearing it. It’s probably a product of the djinn’s memory shit that it even showed up, and of course it’s probably always been Cas’ shirt here anyways. The dream-Cas’ disfigured face and tightly-stretched coat is lingering uncomfortably in Dean’s mind, however, and it’s hard to look at the one sitting across from him without seeing _that_ , too.

He remembers Benny’s words from last night, “if you’re still out of your head in the morning”: this is probably not what he was talking about in the slightest, but at least he has a place to flee to so he doesn’t have to see Cas in that shirt and have the nightmare popping back to him every few minutes. Dean makes up a hasty excuse about Benny having asked him to work this morning — he has no idea whether or how often he actually does work there, but it seems like a plausible enough scenario.

All the parking spaces are filled in front of Benny’s café when he pulls in at just past nine o’clock, and he has to circle the block twice before he spots the empty parking lot on the other side of the street.

The bells on the door tinkle gaily as he walks in, and though the café is slightly fuller this time than last, a few heads still turn to watch him come in. Dean waits until there’s no line, then slinks up to the counter from where Benny’s been glancing at him for the past ten minutes.

He stands opposite the register while he waits for Benny’s attention, intently reading the advertisements taped to the counter and absently scratching a scar on his left elbow. After a minute, Benny grabs something from under the counter, shoves it into Dean’s hands, and beckons Dean to follow him back into the kitchen.

It’s an apron. Okay, so he’s here to work, or something. Dean gets the idea, after a minute, and starts working the neck loop, which seems to have been previously adjusted for a hobbit, awkwardly over his head. Benny doesn’t wait for him to finish fumbling with the ties, and starts talking as he moves over to start cooking.

“So what’s eatin’ at you today, brother?” he asks, flicking on the gas for the range and grabbing a sausage patty from the freezer.

Dean glares at him. “Not funny.”

“Aw, it was a little funny,” Benny retorts.

“Did you actually want me to do anything, or am I just wearing this because it looks good on me?”

Benny glances back over his shoulder at the bright pink, ruffled, and much-too-short apron adorning Dean’s frame, and deftly cracks an egg without giving Dean a reply.

The only sound between them for a while is the hiss of the stove, and then finally Dean starts again. “Look, Benny, it’s just —” he pauses, watching Benny’s movements as he moves the now-complete sandwich onto a plate. “I can’t do this,” he finishes, lamely.

“Do what, now?”

“The whole — me and Cas, together, thing. It’s not gonna work.”

Benny raises his eyebrows. “Alright, then. Here, make yourself useful, and go take this out.” He hands the plate to Dean, who handles it like it’s fragile heirloom china, and nods out the door. “Back by the window, red shirt. Ask her if she wants more coffee.”

Dean, confused, does so, and returns blushing almost as pink as the apron strap around his neck. Benny, clearly fully knowing that particular customer’s penchant toward the spontaneously obscene, grins at Dean’s disgruntled look. “So, you were saying?” he prompts.

Dean rubs his neck, still red-faced, and gathers his train of thought. “I don’t know if me and Cas are gonna work,” he repeats.

Benny nods. “Okay. And you think this why?”

“‘Cause — I mean, we’ve been talking about us having a relationship, and I want that, it’s just — the whole thing kinda freaks me out.” Dean’s voice drops to a mutter on the last several words.

“You’re saying you think it’s gonna fall through because you’re too chicken to kiss him back?”

“No!” Dean protests, but then he sighs. “Yeah. Basically.”

“Well,” Benny drawls, turning, “do you want the long answer or the short one?”

“Um. Short?”

“Kiss him back.”

“ _Benny._ ”

“No, honest. You like him, and he likes you, so what’s the hang-up? Nobody’s perfect at it the first time or two.”

“But —”

“And really, Dean, you should be explaining this to him, not to me.” Benny flicks a towel at Dean, who bats it away.

“I tried that,” Dean protests.

“Well, try it again. And get out of my kitchen, I’m trying to run a business here,” Benny chides. Dean holds up his hands in surrender, and scoots out.

 

* * *

 

Dean makes it all the way back to the car before realizing he still has the apron on. Probably why those chicks were looking at him funny as he passed them on the way out. He counts three cars go by before he can undo the ties in the back — he’s a hunter, not a cook, damn it, and he’s quickly starting to regret knotting them so snugly — and not wanting to do the walk of shame to return it to Benny, balls it up and stuffs it into the glovebox. He kind of doubts Benny needs it back very quickly, anyway.

 

* * *

 

Cas isn’t at the house when he gets back, and he almost starts to wonder if the guy went to church, or something; he certainly wouldn’t have expected the Castiel he knew to be a churchgoer, not after the royal fuck-up that was the apocalypse, but here — well, anything could be possible, though somehow he still doubts.

His expectations are confirmed soon when Cas returns, loaded with grocery bags. “Had to make a run uptown,” Cas explains, lifting the nearest hand as proof; through the bag Dean can see a bottle of dish soap and a box of instant something, and he feels a little dumb for not getting anything more useful than beer, which he still hasn’t gotten a chance to drink, the other morning.

“Got anything good?” Dean asks, assuming there must be something more interesting than dish soap among the spoils. Cas hums, thinking, and Dean gets up from the couch (leaving the newspaper, which contained nothing much more interesting than a couple of old-age obituaries and a summary of last week’s church services) to go investigate.

Cas, it turns out, is a _really boring_ shopper, Dean thinks, rummaging through the bags and making a pathetic show of helping put things away. The most exciting thing he finds is a net-bag of half a dozen plums, and Cas forbids him to snack on them, which takes all the fun away.

It turns out that Sunday is house-cleaning day for the two of them, and when Dean appears less than enthusiastic about the prospect of vacuuming, dusting and wiping a week’s worth of hopefully-metaphorical shit out of the bathroom, Cas subtly suggests that he was planning to go out to the lake later on, and he was hoping Dean could come along, if he wanted to. It turns out to be excellent motivation, because Dean is starting to feel a little bit cooped up after several days of doing basically nothing between a few places in the same small town, and even though he suspects “the lake” won’t be much to sneeze at, it’ll surely be better than nothing.

They finish the house in record time, judging by the expression on Cas’ face when they’re done an hour and a half later, and Dean appoints himself the task of making a quasi-picnic lunch for the trip, it being only just going on noon. They make it out the door with a motley assortment of cold-cuts, bread, chips, a mostly-empty bottle of mayonnaise, and the leftover soda from the other night, and it’s not until Cas pulls his shitty car into a spot on the shore of the tiny reservoir that passes for a lake around here, that Dean realizes he was going to bring the six-pack, too.

Still, he again manages to survive an afternoon without alcohol, and Coke isn’t _really_ that bad, and he finds out that Cas has a latent talent for bird-spotting, so, in all, it’s a successful trip. They finally bundle back into the car after several hours, laughing their hearts out over some sort of joke Cas heard from his coworker, and although the idea of going out again floats between them for a minute, they both decide that they’d rather end up eating at the house tonight.

So Dean ends up cooking, again, stir-fry this time, and Cas whips up a box of brownies that has apparently been sitting in the back of the cupboard for over a year. There’s some part of Dean that revels in the domesticity of cooking side-by-side with his best friend, and there’s a smaller part that is completely weirded out by it; after all, he can count on his fingers the number of times — before this week — that he’s seen Castiel eating, and _cooking_ with him is yet a different and far more intimate beast.

He can’t go much farther down that rabbit hole at the moment, because two things happen almost simultaneously: the rice on the stove boils over, and Cas grabs his shoulder from behind with a hand coated completely in flour.

Dean turns the rice down, sputtering in protest, and turns around to see Cas bent over his mixing bowl with just the tiniest hint of a smirk on his face, and that’s it, it’s war.

Ten minutes later, there’s egg all over both of them, flour completely coating their shirts, and most of the can of chow mein noodles either sticking to one of them or scattered on the counter like birdshot, and Cas, ammunition still in hand, freezes as the stove timer beeps for the rice.

They glare at each other, unmoving, fight slipping away, and then Cas breaks first. “We just cleaned the kitchen this morning,” he giggles, looking at the mess — fairly tame for a food-fight, by what Dean’s seen, but still impressively out-of-character for both of them — and they’re both gone.

The brownies end up a little strange, and definitely thinner than they should have been, and the rice is slightly overcooked, but Dean’s still riding a sugar high from draining the last several swigs out of the Coke bottle before they left the lake and right now, he’s on top of the world.

They clean themselves up, and then they have to clean the kitchen. It takes a while, because Dean keeps stopping every minute or so to snack on the crumbs out of the brownie pan — and when he runs out of crumbs, cutting off pieces of the edge of the leftover brownies — and though it’s hardly exhaustive physical labor, they’re both tired enough by the time they finish that they independently head to bed before very long.

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

“Benny says he set us up,” Dean says, apropos of nothing. He’s wide awake, somehow, even though it’s a quarter past midnight and they’ve both been in bed for over an hour and there’s a ninety-five percent chance Cas is sound asleep.

“What the fuck,” Cas grumbles, rolling over behind him, and Dean mentally chalks himself up an F for pillow talk.

“Why would Benny set us up?” Dean continues, turning to stare blankly at the ceiling. “He never even liked you.”

“He set _you_ up,” Cas corrects, having resigned himself to consciousness, and either missing or not caring about the backhanded insult. “I was already aware of my attraction to you.”

“Lucky for you,” Dean mutters.

“Hm?”

“Well, you know me, I’m Mr. Clueless.” Dean lifts a hand off his chest to gesture in the air.

“Yeah.” Cas grunts, shifting to lie on his back next to Dean. “I just thought you said something else.”

The nonchalance of Cas’ agreement stings, but a more significant thought takes precedence. “Hold on. How long did it take for me to catch on, anyway?”

“A week, maybe?” Cas estimates. “Benny practically had to tell you, by the end, that I was interested in you, or I don’t think you’d ever have gotten it.”

“Yeah.” There’s something not quite right there, but Dean’s too tired to figure it out.

“Can I go back to sleep now?” Cas yawns.

“Yeah. G’night.” Dean rolls over, pulling the blanket back up over his shoulders, and quickly drops off himself.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, Dean wakes up at the impressively late hour of eight o’clock, and finds Cas in the kitchen holding Dean’s phone. “What the hell,” he starts.

Cas looks up at him, and gestures with the phone. “It was beeping,” he explains. “The voice says you’re almost out of minutes.”

Something falls apart, then, low and heavy in Dean’s chest. “Holy shit,” he mutters.

Cas looks at him, head tilted, and Dean laughs, bitter and broken and tumbling over with betrayal. “You’re not him.”

“Dean, what are you talking about?” Cas asks, and Dean turns away, bracing his hands on the wall. “You’re not him,” he repeats. “You’re not Castiel. I’m such a fucking idiot.”

Cas comes up behind him and puts a hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong, Dean?” he asks, voice tight.

Dean flinches away from the touch, and meets Cas’ eyes in time to see his face fall. “What’s my name?” he asks, launching the words like an attack. “My _full_ name.”

“Dean Winchester.” Cas frowns. “Dean, you’re scaring me.”

“Dean _Jonathan_ Winchester,” he spits. “He would have known that.”

“Who?” Cas asks. “What are you talking about, Dean?”

“Castiel. The man you’re supposed to be.”

Cas, though he clearly doesn’t get what Dean is talking about in the slightest, tries to soothe him. “My name is Lucas, sweetheart,” he reminds Dean gently.

Dean laughs, rubbing a hand over his mouth. “Yeah. Should have fucking figured it out sooner.”

Honestly, he should have known something was off the minute he picked up that envelope. He’s never had good luck with djinn, anyway; there was really no sensible reason why he should have expected this one to be any different. Dean, in his right mind, should have found a knife and gotten the fuck out of this place _days_ ago, but he’s not sure he’s been in his right mind for years, now.

Cas is still staring at him, confused, concerned and — Dean can recognize it so well — frightened, and Dean takes the opportunity to circle toward the counter where he instinctively picked out the knife-block several minutes ago. All he has to do is kill himself, and he’ll wake up, he’ll be out. Sam will find him, and they’ll kill the djinn, and he can forget that he ever fucking fell for it.

By the time understanding dawns on Cas’s face, Dean has a knife in his hand, angled neatly toward his jugular, backed up like a wild animal against the kitchen counter with a hand stretched out to warn Cas from coming any closer or trying to stop him.

He swallows, once; for a man so intimate with violence, it still takes all the determination he can muster to hold the knife against his skin. Cas’s eyes flick from the knife, to the movement of Dean’s throat, back to Dean’s own eyes, and the helpless terror Dean sees there is enough to push him gently over the edge.

The last thing Dean thinks, as the knife clatters to the floor and he crumples, gasping, to his knees on the tile, is that he never even got to kiss him.

 

* * *

 

Dean tumbles into awareness almost as abruptly as he left it. Something is beeping steadily from the vicinity of his shoulder, and he thinks he can hear someone breathing, but otherwise, it’s surprisingly silent. Dark, too, he notices, even before he opens his eyes; and when he does, it takes most of a minute to recognize his surroundings.

The mostly-blank wall in front of him, coupled with the decade-old TV bolted to it and the dark outline of a corkboard, identifies it instantly. A hospital room — a single one, apparently, as he glances around; the djinn must have beaten him up pretty good, if Sam descended to the level of taking him to a public hospital. Dean idly wonders what names they’re using this time.

He hears the soft click of the door-handle, and instinctively feigns sleep. If it’s Sam, he’ll know that Dean’s bullshitting, and if it’s a nurse, hopefully they’ll take the hint and not bother him.

The door latches shut, and he listens to the footsteps of whoever it is as they cross the room toward his bed. Probably a nurse, he reasons, because those definitely aren’t Sam’s gigantic strides. Someone slightly shorter, and more hesitant; the person stops three times between the door and his bed, although that could just be an effect of the dark.

There’s the sound of a plastic cup being set down on the table next to him — at least he’ll have water, if nothing else. Dean wonders if he can remember any of the blessing rituals for holy water, but then he realizes he probably doesn’t have a rosary in the hospital gown. So much for demon protection, he muses.

The stranger stands next to his bed long past the point of ‘professional concern’, right through ‘creepy’ and well into ‘murderously obsessed’ before they move again. A long, slow sigh — an incongruously loud sound in the sterile, silent space — and then a cool hand settles around Dean’s wrist. It’s all he can do not to flinch; of all the things he would expect someone to do to him in the middle of the night, this would not have been one of them.

The touch is brief. As the hand pulls away, the stranger finally speaks; quietly, under his breath, but Dean hears the words “why” and his name, and the minute he recognizes the voice, his heart sinks. It’s Cas, of course it’s Cas — and if it’s him, that means Dean must not have left the djinn-world after all, and now he doesn’t have a way to get out of here.

 _Shit_.

 

* * *

 

It’s brighter the next time Dean wakes up; sunlight streams in through the cracks in the old Venetian blind over the window, and light from the hallway hits his eyes through the door. He groans, squinting his eyes shut, and hears a chuckle from somewhere near him. “Good morning, sunshine,” Dean hears, and the voice he never thought he’d hear again pops his eyes open so fast he spawns a headache right then and there.

Lisa is in his dream. Okay. He’s starting to see a pattern here, and he doesn’t like it one fucking bit.

“You’re lucky to be here,” she tells him. “Your boyfriend pretty much saved your life. You hungry?” she adds, as if ‘you almost died’ is an acceptable segue into breakfast. Dean never even got breakfast in bed from the real Lisa, and if this keeps up, it’ll be a definite improvement over the shitty year they spent together after Stull.

He’s not hungry, anyway, which kind of ruins the whole thing, and the weird brownish smoothie thing sitting on the tray beside his bed looks like it might turn even Sam off, so he has to decline with some excuse about his throat hurting if he swallows. It’s true, actually, his throat hurts like hell, but by Dean Winchester standards, asking for special treatment because of pain is up there with forgetting to clean a weapon.

Lisa turns to leave. Dean realizes she had already changed the bandage on his neck before he woke up, and okay, there was a person not only in his room but touching his neck, he must really be getting clumsy. On the spur of the moment, not wanting her to leave, he grabs her attention as she goes. “Hey, Lisa?”

She turns back toward him, and it’s really dumb, because there’s literally no reason she should know him here; fuck, even the real Lisa doesn’t know him anymore.

He settles on a simple question. “You got any kids?” Dean tries, missing ‘friendly chat’ by a mile and landing solidly in ‘probably a pedophile’. Fuck.

“Nope.” She smiles, then resumes her course, clicking the door gently shut behind her.

He only really gets what he just asked her ten minutes later, as he’s flipping over and over through the seven or so channels the TV in his room gets, and — _shit._ A perfect world, he thinks. At least here, there’s a few people alive that he didn’t completely fuck up.

 

* * *

 

Much to Dean’s surprise, he gets released from the hospital that afternoon. The doctor, just like Lisa, told him he was extremely lucky to be alive, that the air embolism from the vein he cut should have killed him. However, he says that as long as Cas promises to keep an eye on him and Dean promises not to attempt suicide again, there’s no reason to keep him any longer. He gets a bottle of pills, instructions to change the bandage on his neck every so often, and then he’s free.

Dean realizes, soon, sitting shotgun in Cas’ tiny eco-car, that he didn’t think this through very well. The drive from the hospital is fifteen minutes of some of the most stressful silence Dean’s ever experienced, and he’s willing to bet money that now Cas is _really_ pissed.

They arrive at the house that Dean’s quickly growing to despise, and Cas walks him in. “So, I guess I’m on house arrest,” Dean jokes, and the murderous look he receives is answer enough. At least he’ll have Netflix to keep him company, if nothing else. If he were allowed near a knife right now (he wasn’t so blind not to notice that all of the sharp cooking utensils had disappeared from the counters) Dean thinks he could probably carve the tension in the air.

He turns on the TV, for noise if nothing else, and as Cas makes no indication of joining him, watches the five-o’clock news by himself. There’s nothing of importance or interest going on in the Pontiac area, and he almost falls asleep during the tragic feature story of a local woman’s famous flowerbeds that died in a frost over the weekend.

Cas does, eventually, offer him supper — box-mix macaroni and cheese, and the serious way he presents it makes it hard to keep a straight face — but Dean’s exceptionally not hungry, and, besides, he’s still pretty skeeved out about this whole thing. Sitting down and docilely eating dinner with the guy who’s masquerading as his friend is one of the last things on Dean’s list right now.

Dean stares stubbornly at the TV, which happens to be playing a tampon ad, and from somewhere behind him, Cas sighs. He walks into the living room, plate in hand, and sits down just as stubbornly in an armchair across from Dean. “I’m not an idiot, you know. I remember what you said yesterday morning,” Cas announces, scooping a pile of wobbly pasta onto his fork.

“Um.” He knows he said some really idiotic stuff. His knee-jerk reaction, when he realized the depth — or, more accurately, lack of depth — of his and Cas’ relationship, had been to lash out, and to be fair, the guy didn’t deserve it. After all, it’s hardly Cas’ fault, being a product of Dean’s subconscious high on djinn-juice, that the scenario Dean was thrown into was shit. If anything, he realizes, it’s his own stupidity that landed him here; he still can’t remember how the djinn got to him, but there’s an excellent chance that if he had been better-prepared this would never have happened in the first place. And, of course, he wasn’t prepared, because he was off his game, because he was still upset about Castiel’s death.

“ _Castiel_ ,” Cas says. “That’s what you called me.”

— Fuck. “Yeah,” Dean mutters. He’s ready to get out of this funhouse right about yesterday, thank you very much.

“I looked it up. That’s a character from a book series.” Cas is staring at him, hard, and Dean has to fight the urge to drop his head into his hands.

“Yeah.”

“One of the main characters of which is named Dean.”

This is not going according to plan.

“Cas —” Dean tries. “I swear, it’s not like it sounds.”

“Dean, I don’t know what’s going on, but you’re seriously starting to scare me.” The macaroni is all but forgotten now. Cas’ fist is clenched, tight, and the strain in his voice bleeds through his whole posture.

The TV chatters on, behind them, now having moved on to the weather forecast, and Dean finds the mute button on the remote and shuts it off. The silence settles over them, stiflingly gentle, and it’s a little while before Cas speaks again.

“If you need — if we need — to get help, or anything,” he begins, subdued and halting, and Dean’s heart sinks. “We can do that. I don’t know what — I don’t know what to do here, Dean. But —” Cas glances up at him, then back to his plate. He finishes, soft: “But I’ll do it with you.”

“Cas,” Dean breathes. _You’ve got this all wrong_ , he wants to say, but something in Cas’ tone pins him in place; the admission reminds him of the words of another not-quite-Cas, and it’s a little funny, how every version of the guy he’s met has volunteered in one way or another to stick with him through the shit he gets himself into.

And he really should have realized, before, what that meant. It shouldn’t have finally happened here, in a house that isn’t his and a world that isn’t his, with the TV flickering images of tornadoes and lost children at him, and Cas staring into his macaroni in the armchair. It should have been earlier, while he still had the chance to tell him; but now he _understands_ , finally —

— _“I’ll hold them off, I’ll hold them all off!”_ —

— _“Are you coming?” “Of course.” —_

_— “I gave everything for you!” —_

_— “I always come when you call, and I am your friend.” —_

— _“I’ll find some way to redeem myself to you.”_ —

— _“We’re … friends?”_ —

— _“Alright, I’ll try.” —_

— _“I remember you.”_ —

— _“Well, I’ll go with you.” —_

_— “I’m not leaving here without you, understand?” “I understand.” —_

The memories wash over him, slotting into place like perfectly-cut puzzle pieces, and he’s fighting to breathe with the current. Dean finally gets it, and it all finally makes sense. The undercurrent of _wrong_ that’s been niggling at his mind the whole week slides to the front. It felt wrong, and it felt rushed, and it felt shallow, and it was: he’s known Cas for _years_ , now, and to have it reduced, molded into the shape of a regular person’s romantic life — it’s no wonder he felt out of place.

And then, still, even in this wrong, imaginary world, Cas chooses — and Cas chose him.

Dean breathes in, long and deep, and is remade.

“Dean?”

“Yeah?” Dean looks up to meet Cas’s eyes.

“I love you.”

The universe holds its breath, as the tide rushes in, and Dean smiles at the floor, broken, and finally, eternally whole. “I know.”

“Will you let me help?” They’re back to the reality of the situation, and Dean understands that this is his choice, now. And this time, he is the one who leaves.

“I can’t, Cas.”

“Dean?” Cas’ fist clenches, again.

“I can’t stay.” Yesterday’s anger is gone completely, replaced by an all-encompassing sadness, for himself, for Castiel, and for all the things that could have been. “I have to leave.”

“Dean, we can work something out. Please.” Cas is begging, now, and every word aches.

Dean shuts the TV off; sets the remote on the floor, and moves over to sit on the edge of Cas’ chair, taking solace in the contact points between their knees. He puts a hand on Cas’ arm; they’ve long since passed the point of no return, but if Dean can just make him understand, then maybe he’ll be able to live with himself.

“You can’t fix me, Cas,” he admits. Cas is thinking of personality disorders and fantasy delusions; Dean remembers Hell, and death, and loss. “I used to think you could,” Dean continues. “My trenchcoated knight in shining armor.” Cas frowns, and the expression is so familiar that it makes Dean smile, a little.

He pulls Cas against him, moving his arm around his shoulder, and rests his forehead on Cas’ temple. The position is uncomfortable, and his perch on the armrest isn’t steady, and it’s hardly romantic, but maybe that’s what love is, Dean thinks.

They breathe together, once, twice, and Dean finally summons all his courage. “I love you too, Cas,” he says, finally, and his voice and his heart break in tandem.

Cas’ breath hitches, and if he stays any longer Dean might not be able to leave. Gently, he cups Cas’ head, lips pressing a promise into his hairline; and then, with his last ounces of resolve, he tips his head down, and seals the contract with a kiss.

Dean stands, lingering his hand on Cas’ shoulder, and breathes away the flood behind his eyes.

“Bye, Cas.”

He lets go.

He makes it almost to the door before Cas catches his attention again. “Dean,” he calls, watery laughter in his voice. “You’ll want your keys.”

 

* * *

 

With Cas’ stricken face still dancing in his mind, Dean pulls the door shut behind him and dazedly makes it down the porch stairs onto the sidewalk. He’s not even angry anymore, at this point, and he’s definitely sure he just put Cas in tears; and even if he knows backwards, forwards and branded into his flesh that it’s not and never was _his_ Cas, it’s not a look you ever want to see on your best friend’s face, regardless of who’s wearing it.

The last time he saw Cas — Cas _tiel_ — this bare, it was in one of Bobby’s outbuildings, a dead demon and a mud-blotched devil’s trap and torture tools setting the scene, and they both knew they were unchangeably on opposite sides of the rising conflict but friends don’t let friends open doors to Purgatory, or something. Cas had pleaded with him to understand his point of view, to reconsider, but he had been so _mad_ , at that point, like a spiteful ex, that he rejected all of Cas’ attempts at reconciliation. It wasn’t a good idea, in hindsight, and he can realize now that most of the shit that had gone down that year had been pretty much everyone’s fault, but the hurt and betrayal in Castiel’s eyes that day was a sight Dean isn’t likely to ever forget.

Dean makes it down about halfway to the street before it really hits him that he really has nowhere to go from here. He’s practically just signed away any claim he had on anything in this universe; even if he could reconcile things with this Cas, that’s one of the last things on his to-do list right now, and it would be really anticlimactic to try and go back in for his clothes or anything at this point.

Charlie had mentioned the other day that she was going to be out of town for the week, so he can’t crash at her place again, and he doesn’t even know where Benny lives when he’s not working at the café, and he’d have to find a phone book or a computer to look for him. And honestly, right now his total-retreat instinct is kicking in big time, urging him to just get in the car and drive until he runs out of gas; it’s worked before at least and, if nothing else, he can go hole up on the other side of the country until he figures out something to do.

He makes it into the car, and then the second bombshell fully hits him. Not only does he have nowhere to go, but he can’t even get back to reality. His attempt at suicide had been useless, and he knows by this point that different djinn dreams have different release triggers; with Charlie, for instance, it had been letting go of her fear, because the fear was what the djinn fed on. He’s got no clue what this — these — and shit, he can’t even remember anything about the hunt — djinn were out for. This djinni must have a really crazy fetish, though, if it thinks putting sad sacks like Dean into an almost-perfect world and then watching them struggle with disillusionment is some sort of nourishment for the soul.

Dean’s eyes drift shut during the course of this thought process, and as he sits in the car he starts to feel a strange pressure, almost, in his head and chest. His first thought is ‘migraine’, but he’s never been the one to get headaches, and it doesn’t _hurt_ , per se. It just feels like someone’s taken a vice-clamp to the sides of his head, and is starting to drill into the bones behind his eyes, and hold on, back up, that _definitely_ hurts. Jesus _Christ._

He pulls his eyes open, squinting against the pain, to see that what he distinctly remembered as being the bench-seat, steering column and driver’s door of the Impala is now an old wooden wicker-back chair, a metal folding table with a glass of water and what looks like about four or five blood bags on it, and the concrete floor and unfinished walls of a nasty-looking old place that he doesn’t recognize and could be just about anywhere. At least he’s out of the dream, unless this is just level two and Cas is going to be some sort of sex dungeon fiend in this one.

Dean’s throat is dry, he finds out, when he starts to try and call for help and instead breaks out into a coughing fit. The rope tying him to the chair is thin and not very securely knotted, and if he wasn’t feeling like breaking out into an asthma attack at any moment, he’d probably be able to pull a knife out of somewhere and get through it easily. Right now, however, he’s having a hard time keeping his eyes open, and a good two-thirds of his conscious energy is going into keeping his breathing even, and all he can do is pray to whatever deities aren’t dead yet that Sam is on his way with reinforcements because there’s no way he’s getting out of this alone.

Footsteps approach from behind him, and though he can’t crane his neck around to see, they’re definitely not Sam’s, and, unless another one of the victims was a hunter and has broken out to rescue him, those are the confident strides of a victorious djinni. He pictures it in his mind: a tall, burly guy, maybe, or a smart-dressed lady with eight-inch stiletto heels that double as daggers in a pinch. And here he sits, the pathetic victim, trying to keep breathing so he doesn’t cough or throw up on himself, and he _really_ has to pee.

The djinni comes into view, and, though he is admittedly not at the top of his creative game today, she’s not at all what he had pictured. She looks about fifty, maybe, with gray-streaked dark hair pulled back into a neat bun, and an outfit that probably made the front page of an Amish fashion magazine. Her skirt rustles quietly as she walks, and, when Dean catches a glimpse of her face, he’s struck by how absolutely gentle she looks. Her face isn’t _old_ , quite, but it’s the face of someone who’s seen some shit happen in their lifetime and actually dealt with it in a relatively healthy manner.

His breathing hitches, and he breaks out coughing again. The djinni must not have been expecting him to be awake, because she startles a bit at the noise, blazing blue eyes whipping to him, cataloguing his condition from head to sleep-tingling toes. When her eyes meet his own, Dean attempts a disarming smile, but she frowns and turns back to her original trajectory: the table. Dean loses track of her movements, but before he knows it, she’s crouching in front of him, offering the glass of water cautiously.

It’s a bad idea, and it goes against all his instincts as a hunter, but that glass could be full of demon blood right now and Dean would still drink it if it meant some relief for his throat. He nods, shrugging his shoulders as if to remind her that he’s still a little tied up over here, and she smiles. Standing again, and bringing one dully-luminescent hand to the back of his head, she brings the glass of water to his lips so that he can drink.

‘Humiliating’ is the word that comes to mind, as he finishes and the djinni walks over to put the glass back on the table. “I was a nurse for a while, back in the thirties,” she says, apropos of nothing and back still turned to Dean. “I haven’t kept up as much recently, but I know that you’re dehydrated and that you’re probably suffering from quite the headache at the moment.”

“You could say that,” Dean grunts. “I assume I have you to thank?”

She turns, eyes muted and lips pursed, raking her gaze over his admittedly not-very-exceptional appearance. “I’m sorry about that. I don’t have any way to keep you hydrated while you’re under, though. If you hadn’t woken up in another day, I’d have had to pull you out myself.” She rolls up her sleeve, veins snaking bright blue down her arm, and steps toward him again. He flinches away, but she chuckles. “Relax. I can alleviate the pain.” She lays her hand on his head, a jolt of icy-hot energy shivers down the back of his neck, and sure enough: the headache quickly recedes.

Dean watches her warily, tracking her slender fingers as she rolls her sleeve back down. Whatever she’s playing at, she’s playing it well; as exhausted, sore, and weak as he’s trying not to feel, he finds himself already slipping into kind of liking her. Monster, he reminds himself. _Djinni_. Mind-fucker, if he’s feeling particularly vulgar.

She glances at him, as he’s savoring that term, and there’s a moment of terrifying clarity where he realizes she’s been reading his mind this whole time. Djinn weren’t supposed to be able to do that, he thought, not without touching the victim. He’s about to ask, but she begins first. “I’m not your average djinni,” she states, leaning against the table and facing him. “I was among the first of my kind. Now, I am one of the last.”

“You’re an alpha?” Dean hadn’t ever met the djinn-Alpha, and he’s not sure if Crowley ever caught it, but he’d have expected someone a little less pacifistic.

She smiles. “No. My alpha is gone, now, like so many others. Without the guidance of al-Khaliq, our race has scattered into dust, and many have returned to their primitive ways of mindless killing and bloodthirst. Sometimes it seems like I, alone, remember His respect for all life.”

This conversation is getting a little out of Dean’s depth, so he steers it back to something he’s used to: anger. “So why the hell did you put me under, then? If you ‘respect all life’. A trip down the rabbit hole isn’t my idea of a good time, you sadistic bitch —”

She straightens immediately, and her whole demeanor electrifies with rage. “You have no _right_ ,” she snaps, suddenly towering in front of him. Her eyes are blazing, and even the white-gray streaks in her hair pulse briefly to vivid cyan, but she deflates just as quickly. “And neither have I,” the djinni murmurs quietly, reaching for a blood bag. When she sees him frowning at it, she explains: “Rabbit, this one. I haven’t fed on human blood since the Crusades.”

“How old are you, then?” Dean asks, subdued by the reminder of what she could do to him if he angered her.

“Older than you,” she replies. “Older than the trick-turners, and the blood-biters, and the heart-stealers,” and Dean counts off in his head; witches, vamps, wolves, and if she was around before _witches_ then she must be practically —

“Biblical,” she finishes aloud for him. “Yes. You Christians forgot us, but we were here before you were.”

“Why do you have me here, then?” Dean asks. “If you’re not out for my blood,” he nods to the bag she’s sipping from, “then what’s the point?”

“I was a nurse,” she repeats, “back in the thirties. When the world began fighting, I volunteered to work on the front lines of the war in Europe, tending to the soldiers who became wounded in battle. The pain and agony that I saw there was overwhelming, and though I did what I could —” she glances at her hand, veins pulsing dark under her skin — “so many still died needlessly, and so many bore such a weight that could never be healed, that I fled.”

She’s completely off her rocker, Dean decides. “This isn’t World War II,” he reminds her drily, “this is Michigan. I was hunting you.”

“I know.” She nods. “And you, like so many of your kin, are not patient.” She takes one more long drink from the blood bag, and sets it down. “I fled from the war, and I fled from the hospitals, and I returned to my homeland, for a dozen years or so. Those who once had worshiped us now began to hunt us; and, again, I fled.” Dean starts to make another smart comment, but he remembers that if nothing else she’s making an excellent time-stall and Sam could be on his way, so he refrains.

The djinni continues. “Now, I am a wanderer. There are so few of my kind in this country, and they are so young; you and your brothers have made us a dying race. But unlike them, I do not hunt you in return; instead of wildly killing, taking vengeance on all for the actions of a few, I follow my al-Khaliq’s instructions, to help and not to harm.”

Dean snorts, feeling the rope rubbing raw at his wrists, which are throbbing in time with his slowly-returning headache. She eyes him, but he shakes his head. “No, go on. Tell me about how you’re going to play nurse, and get your fetish on, and make me all _better_ ,” he snarls. Then, extrapolating farther, he barks out a laugh. “Oh, no, I know what this is, okay? You’re spouting all this ‘helping people’ crap, but I get it. It’s fucking gay therapy.”

She tilts her head, confused, and it’s such a Castiel-like gesture that it makes Dean even angrier. “Look. Me and Sam get in town, you find out that we’re hunting you, you see me and all my — grief, or whatever the fuck, because my best fucking friend just died yet a- _fucking_ -gain, and you think, hey, look, there’s a basket case for me to go to town on. Well, newsflash, lady, I don’t want your so-called help.” Dean’s voice cracks on the last word, which sort of negates the intensity of the whole thing, but he stares her hard in the eyes to make up for it.

She stares back at him, uncomprehending, and Dean, swallowing hard, takes it as an opportunity to go on. “And even if you could actually psych me out of liking dudes, which, by the way, you _cannot_ , that was a really shitty way to do it. Like, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in love with any — guy-djinn, or something, but you don’t help someone get over a death by shoving a shit copy of the person back in their face.”

The djinn breaks out into a smile. “You freely admit you were in love with him?”

Dean glances away. “Yeah?” he returns, defensive.

“And you accept that he died, and that you need to move on?”

“Yeah.” It’s quieter, this time.

“And,” she continues, “you understood that I had altered your experiences and memories to create a deliberately false portrayal of your friend.”

“Yeah.” Dean meets her eyes again, and this time it’s he that’s confused.

“The mind,” the djinni declares, “is a truly remarkable thing. And,” she points at him, “very susceptible. Even a suggestion, repeated often enough, can alter what you think you remember about someone.”

“So?”

“So, even though you are fully aware that the things which happened inside your head just now weren’t real, the very fact that you experienced them leaves a mark on your subconscious.”

“Why do it then? Why — any of it?” Dean’s past angry now; left confused, tired, and, above all, ready to be done thinking.

“You needed to understand, Dean,” she tells him, and the gentle way she cradles his name with her voice tumbles him reluctantly into liking her. “You needed to remember, and you needed to know how precious that memory is; because, after all, it’s the perversion of those memories that eats away at good men and women and turns them into monsters. Even you are not blameless here.”

Dean can’t help but think of his father, as she speaks; John was a good guy, and he had done what he thought he needed to after Mary’s death, but Dean would be the first to tell you that his parents’ relationship had been pretty disillusioning before her death, and that — even as fondly as he remembers her — his mother was never the blessed saint that John made her out to be. He may have been four years old, but he had overheard the dreaded D-word during his mom’s supposedly-private phone conversations, and he wasn’t an idiot.

Him and Cas, though —

Well, the guy was _literally_ an angel when they met, so it wasn’t hard to paint a few unrealistic pictures of guardians and fluffy wings and ‘angels watching over you’, once he had come to terms with angels actually existing. And then _guardians_ had turned into elitist dicks, and he’d realized, once again, that there wasn’t anyone looking out for anyone, after all.

“Not the angels, no,” she cuts in. “It was Castiel alone in whom you found faith.”

“Fuck you,” Dean mumbles, for lack of anything better to say.

She smiles. “Because every time he sacrificed his life for you, he always, in the end, came back; even now, a part of you still believes, against reason, that the universe will give him back to you. But what if it doesn’t, Dean? Do you ever consider that?”

Dean glares, and it’s answer enough.

“He loved you. He always loved you. You only needed to know how to remember.”

He can’t breathe.

“Remember him, Dean. Your beloved and your friend.”

She cups her hand to his face, eyes shining bright.

“Remember.”

A door clangs open behind them, obscenely loud in the silent room, and Sam is yelling, and Dean tries to call his name but his voice catches, and Sam has a knife, and

her skin flares blue, once

and she slumps to the floor

and Dean remembers.

Sam’s all over him in a second, cutting the rope from around his wrists and slinging Dean’s arm over his shoulder and trying to take his pulse and _he’s right here_ , thank you very much, and Sam can get the hell off.

And then he takes one step by himself and very nearly falls flat on his face, and Sam practically has to drag him out to the car. Sam shoves him into the passenger side, slams the door shut, throws his knife into the trunk, and stomps around to the driver’s side without saying a word. They sit, uncomfortably, for a minute, and then both speak at once.

“Sam.”

“Dean, that was really fucking stupid, going after it alone like that. I’ve been looking for you for _days_ , you idiot.”

“Sam.”

“You could have fucking died. Djinn victims usually don’t even last more than two days before they’re too far gone to get back. You could have —”

“Sam.”

“I don’t fucking care how — bored, or self-sacrificial, or stupidly impulsive you are, but you can’t just go after a djinn alone, Dean! You should _know_ this.”

“ _Sam!_ ”

“ _What._ ”

“She was a good one. She didn’t even go for my blood, look.” Dean gestures to his neck, completely unharmed, and feels the phantom itch of the knife against his skin.

Sam frowns. “Oh. Well, fuck.”

Dean scoots down and lets his head rest against the window. “Let’s just go, Sam.”

“Yeah.” The car rumbles to life beneath them, and they pull away, leaving Michigan in their dust.

 

* * *

 

The drive back to Kansas is one of the slowest Sam can ever remember. What should have been a fourteen-hour day trip stretches into two days, because there’s no way he’s letting Dean drive, and they stay overnight close to the Missouri-Illinois border. It’s a tiny but well-advertised motel that has Mark Twain paraphernalia plastered all over the walls and an oil painting of a Mississippi riverboat hanging between the beds in their double room, but they’ve stayed at much worse.

It’s around the time they stop for groceries in Lebanon that Dean really starts getting noticeably twitchy. Sam’s not sure if it’s the fact that he, not Dean, is driving — he’s barely gotten to drive the car since Amelia, and he knows Dean’s gotten more and more protective of it over the years — or from whatever the djinni did to him, or just what, but he knows it will be good to be home. Sam has to shove Dean, almost, through the checkout line, after he keeps staring at the cashier; he apologizes hastily for his brother, hands Dean the bag with the beer in it, and makes their escape.

The sun’s starting its descent behind the trees as they pull into the bunker’s long driveway. Dean’s fiddling with the newspaper they bought, dog-earing and straightening the corner again and again, and Sam’s ready to be out of the car just so that he won’t have to watch Dean out of the corner of his eye any longer.

He pulls to a stop a few yards from the door — their regular spot became a mud puddle as soon as it started raining, and though Dean grumbled initially about the extra few feet of walking, it hasn’t bothered either of them too much.

Just as Sam’s about to open his door, Dean looks up from the newspaper. His fingers still on the page, and he glances first at Sam, then at a speck of dirt on the dashboard. “She showed me Cas,” he mumbles.

“What?” Sam asks, more out of surprise than anything; he heard Dean perfectly, but it’s his job as a brother to make him say it again.

“The djinn. She — the thing she did in my head, Cas was there.” Dean crumples the paper.

“Okay.” Sam shifts back into the seat, calculating in his mind how long they can sit in the car with the air conditioning off and still have a chance at refrigerating the groceries in the back. The last time they had a conversation like this, it was after they’d tried to get the angel tablet, and Dean had kept rubbing his cheek so often that Sam had gotten suspicious.

It’s pretty telling, to be honest, that it’s becoming a habit that every honest conversation they have involves either himself or Castiel.

Dean licks his lips, straightening out the paper in his hand. “In the dream, me and Cas — we were a thing.”

Sam nods. He’s been expecting this conversation for a while, to be totally honest; he had started wondering, around the time they’d started to piece things together about Castiel and Crowley and Purgatory, and Dean had been defending him with his every breath. It hadn’t been until that night right before Castiel came back, though, when Dean had confessed to having hallucinations about him (which, in Sam’s expert opinion, had sounded a lot like what had happened to him after Jess, but he had tactfully kept his mouth shut), that Sam had really started to suspect that something was up with his brother.

Dean glances at him out of the corner of his eye. “Say something, Sam.”

Sam starts. “Um. Good?”

Dean frowns at him. “I was expecting a little bit more of a ‘what the fuck, Dean’.”

“Sorry.” Sam shrugs. “I mean, everyone knows you love the guy, so it’s not too hard a leap to get that you were _in_ love with the guy.”

“Shut up.” It doesn’t carry any venom.

“Seriously, Dean, I mean it. It’s a — it’s good. Really.”

“It wasn’t, though,” Dean mumbles, rubbing the newspaper between his fingers.

“Hm?”

“It wasn’t —” he clenches his fist — “it wasn’t right. It wasn’t really Cas. Just some guy that looked and talked like him.” The obituaries start to tear under his fingers.

“Dean.”

“He didn’t know me.”

“Dean.”

Dean looks up from the paper, staring vacantly through the window. “ _Fuck_. Sam, his eyes weren’t even blue. Son of a _bitch_.”

“ _Dean._ ” Sam isn’t paying any attention at all; instead, his eyes are fixed on something near the bunker door.

Dean’s eyes find where Sam’s have landed; a figure, huddled against the concrete wall, and all he can see is the dark shock of hair and the clothes are all wrong but Sam _knows_ , and Dean almost falls out the passenger door in his haste.

Sam gets out too, almost as an afterthought, watching Dean crouching next to Castiel to shake him awake — _shit_ , how long had the guy been waiting? — then grabbing him by the shoulders, and Sam’s ready to intervene because he hasn’t seen the two of them interact without arguing for something like years, now.

Sam only makes it to the front of the car before Dean, Castiel not even all the way to his feet, is wrapping his arms under Cas’ shoulders and holding on for his life. A brief smile flits over Sam’s face, growing to a grin when Castiel brings his own arms up around Dean’s back; and then he decides to let the two of them alone, and bring in the groceries.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Wow! This has been quite a journey. Huge, huge credit to my alpha ([basiacat](http://basiacat.tumblr.com/)), beta, artist ([veloshe](http://veloshe.tumblr.com)), and Tumblr family for keeping me going on this even when I didn't feel like it — it's thanks to all them that I have anything to post :)
> 
> Please feel free to comment: I'm super interested in hearing people's reactions!


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